This study examined how Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with and without a history of late talking (LT) process familiar monosyllabic words with unexpected lexical tones, focusing on both phonological and semantic violations. This study initially enrolled 64 Mandarin-speaking toddlers: 31 with a history of LT (mean age: 27.67 months) and 33 without…

As we listen to speech, our ability to understand what was said requires us to retrieve and bind together individual word meanings into a coherent discourse representation. This so-called semantic unification is a fundamental cognitive skill, and its development relies on the integration of neural activity throughout widely distributed functional…

The present study explored the origins of word learning in early infancy. Using event-related potentials (ERP) we monitored the brain activity of 3-month-old infants when they were repeatedly exposed to several initially novel words paired consistently with each the same initially novel objects or inconsistently with different objects. Our results…

School-aged and adolescent children continue to demonstrate improvements in how they integrate and comprehend real-time, auditory language over this developmental time period, which can have important implications for academic and social success. To better understand developmental changes in the neural processes engaged during language…

It has been proposed that language impairments in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) stem from atypical neural processing of speech and/or nonspeech sounds. However, the strength of this proposal is compromised by the unreliable outcomes of previous studies of speech and nonspeech processing in ASD. The aim of this study was to…