Many Aboriginal Australian communities are undergoing language shift from traditional Indigenous languages to contact varieties such as Kriol, an English-lexified Creole. Kriol is reportedly characterised by lexical items with highly variable phonological specifications, and variable implementation of voicing and manner contrasts in obstruents…

Linguistic input in multi-lingual/-cultural contexts is highly variable. We examined the production of English and Malay laterals by fourteen early bilingual preschoolers in Singapore who were exposed to several allophones of coda laterals: Malay caregivers use predominantly clear-l in English and Malay, but their English coda laterals can also be…

Purpose: Previous studies with children and adults have demonstrated a "familiar talker advantage"--better word recognition for familiar talkers. The goal of the current study was to test whether this phenomenon is modulated by a child's language ability. Method: Sixty children with a range of language ability were trained to learn the…

Phonological selectivity is a phenomenon where children preselect which target words they attempt to produce. The present study examines selectivity in the acquisition of complex onsets and codas in English, and specifically in the acquisition of biconsonantal (CC) clusters in each position compared to triconsonantal (CCC) clusters. The data come…

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…

In this work, we examine a context in which a conflict arises between two roles that infant-directed speech (IDS) plays: making language structure salient and modeling the adult form of a language. Vowel devoicing in fluent adult Japanese creates violations of the canonical Japanese consonant-vowel word structure pattern by systematically…

This article investigates the acquisition of the focus particle "auch" "also" by German-learning children. We report data from spontaneous and elicited production of utterances with the focus particle "auch" by 1- to 4-year-olds complementing earlier findings of a delayed production of the unaccented "auch" compared to the accented one. But in…

The system of deriving baby speech from adult speech is discussed. The theory is based on the system of consonantal replacements. (NCR)

The early and continued use of semantic, syntactic and contextual clues in recognizing mispronounced words was demonstrated in an experiment involving preschoolers, grade school students and college students. Errors in highly predictable words and contexts were most easily recognized by all regardless of reading ability. (PMJ)

This issue is devoted to first language acquisition. It includes twelve papers concerning: the acquisition of liquids ("1" and "r"); creative errors in the written syntax of deaf children; theoretical and methodological problems in the acquisition of phonology, illustrated from Greek and English: the basis of articulation; the philosophy of…

About 2,200 immigrant children in Sweden were studied by means of tests and teacher questionnaires. The children, representing 36 nationalities, were born outside Sweden and were distributed over the nine grades of the Swedish Comprehensive School. Various functional language skills in Swedish as a second language (L2), nonverbal intelligence and…