In many so-called canonical null subject languages, null and overt subject pronouns have contrasting referential preferences: null subjects tend to maintain reference to the preceding subject while overt pronominal subjects do not. We propose that children acquire this contrast by initially restricting their attention to 1st and 2nd person…

Over time, people who spend a lot of time together (e.g., roommates) begin sounding alike. Even over the course of short conversations, interlocutors often become more acoustically similar to one another. This phenomenon -- known as phonetic alignment -- has been well studied in adult interactions, but much less is known about alignment patterns…

The present study analyses 3- to 6-year-old children's dialect-standard repertoires in an Austrian-Bavarian sociolinguistic setting and investigates how far individual repertoires can be explained by input and sociodemographic factors. Adults' linguistic repertoires in the area typically comprise a certain spectrum on the dialect-standard…

Bilingual children are often exposed to non-native speech through their parents. Yet, little is known about the relation between bilingual preschoolers' speech production and their speech input. The present study investigated the production of voice onset time (VOT) by Dutch-German bilingual preschoolers and their sequential bilingual mothers. The…