Research on "parentese," the acoustically exaggerated, slower, and higher-pitched speech directed toward infants, has mostly focused on maternal contributions, although it has long been known that fathers also produce parentese. Given recent societal changes in family dynamics, it is necessary to revise these mother-centered models of…

What are the vocal experiences of children growing up on Malakula island, Vanuatu, where multilingualism is the norm? Long-form audio-recordings captured spontaneous speech behavior by, and around, 38 children (5-33 months, 23 girls) from 11 villages. Automated analyses revealed most children's vocal input came from female adults and other…

Purpose: We sought to establish normative growth curves for intelligibility development for the speech of typically developing children as revealed by objectively based orthographic transcription of elicited single-word and multiword utterances by naïve listeners. We also examined sex differences, and we compared differences between single-word…

Purpose: This study used a cross-sequential design to identify developmental changes in narrative speech rhythm and intonation. The aim was to provide a robust, clinically relevant characterization of normative changes in speech prosody across the early school-age years. Method: Structured spontaneous narratives were elicited annually from 60…

Teachers and parents intuitively judge the 'level' of the child and the 'level' of the text and try to match them; they know that overestimation or underestimation of either will be met with restlessness or boredom. In this way, they have an empirical understanding of Vygotsky's ZPD--the zone of proximal development he envisioned as measuring the…

Although children's use of speech registers such as Baby Talk is well documented, little is known about their understanding of Foreigner Talk, a register addressed to non-native speakers. In Study 1, 4- to 8-year-old children and adults (N = 125) heard 4 registers (Foreigner Talk, Baby Talk, Peer Talk, and Teacher Talk) and predicted who would…

Studies investigating the development of tense/aspect in children with developmental disorders have focused on production frequency and/or relied on short spontaneous speech samples. How children with developmental disorders use future forms/constructions is also unknown. The current study expands this literature by examining frequency,…

Adults use vision to perceive low-fidelity speech; yet how children acquire this ability is not well understood. The literature indicates that children show reduced sensitivity to visual speech from kindergarten to adolescence. We hypothesized that this pattern reflects the effects of complex tasks and a growth period with harder-to-utilize…

This study investigates parent-teacher dialogues on child language learning as constructed in 19 interviews with migrant parents of Polish ethnolinguistic background, resettled in Norway and caring for young preschoolers and school-goers. Targeting reported speech as a linguistic resource for enacting agency in discourse, the focal interest is in…

The process of the language acquisition of children is reflected in two aspects; language structure and pragmatic functions. Data from "The Longtime Tracing Oral Corpus of Typical Development Children" (one child; 2,367 sentences) are analyzed. This study examines the child's sentence final particle (SFP) "ba", in which we…

Research on sources of individual difference in parental Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) is limited and there is a particular lack of research on fathers' compared to mothers' speech. This study examined the predictive relations between infant characteristics and variability in paternal lexical diversity (LD) in dyadic free play with two-year-olds (M…

Generics ("'Dogs' bark") convey important information about categories and facilitate children's learning. Two studies with parents and their 2- or 4-year-old children (N = 104 dyads) examined whether individual differences in generic language use are as follows: (a) stable over time, contexts, and domains, and (b) linked…

Is "two" ever a plural marker in child language? By some accounts, children bootstrap the distinction between the words "one" and "two" by observing their use with singular-plural marking ("one ball/two balls"). Others argue that the numeral "two" marks plurality before children begin using numerals to denote precise quantities. We tested the…

This research examined children's questions and the reactions to the answers they receive in conversations with adults. If children actively seek explanatory knowledge, they should react differently depending on whether they receive a causal explanation. Study 1 examined conversations following 6 preschoolers' (ages 2-4 years) causal questions in…

We report on a study investigating 3-5-year-old children's use of gesture to resolve lexical ambiguity. Children were told three short stories that contained two homonym senses; for example, "bat" (flying mammal) and "bat" (sports equipment). They were then asked to re-tell these stories to a second experimenter. The data were coded for the means…