This study focuses on parental use of parentese: the acoustically exaggerated, clear, and higher-pitched speech produced by adults across cultures when they address infants. While previous research shows that parentese enhances language learning and processing, it is still unclear what drives the variability in the amount of parental parentese…

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…

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…

Infants and toddlers encounter numerous spoken story experiences early in their lives: conversations, oral stories, and language games such as songs and rhymes. Many adults are even surprised to learn that children this young need these kinds of natural language experiences at all. Adults help very young children take a step along the path toward…

Studies of English and German find that children tend to acquire word-final consonant clusters before word-initial consonant clusters. This order of acquisition is generally attributed to articulatory, frequency and/or morphological factors. This contrasts with recent experimental findings from French, where two-year-olds were better at producing…

The nature and origin of the human capacity for acquiring language is not yet fully understood. Here we uncover early roots of this capacity by demonstrating that humans are born with a preference for listening to speech. Human neonates adjusted their high amplitude sucking to preferentially listen to speech, compared with complex non-speech…

Two speech events, narration and joking conversation, are analyzed from speech samples of Hawaiian 5- to 7-year-olds. An underlying iterative routine was found which allows for both stories and joking to be produced jointly in a contrapuntal style. (Author/RM)

This research disputes the traditional position on babbling by showing that the phonetic content of babbled utterances exhibits many of the same preferences for certain kinds of phonetic elements and sequences that have been found in the production of meaningful speech by children in later stages of language development. (Author/RM)

In this longitudinal investigation of the emerging grammar of seven children, differences in linguistic acquisition were observed. Analyses revealed two distinct styles of syntactic acquisition that appeared to be sex- and speed-related with specific ties to particular utterance types and grammatical-relational specification. (Author/RM)

A speech act approach to the transition from pre-linguistic to linguistic communication is adopted in order to consider language in relation to behavior and to allow for an emphasis on the use, rather than the form, of language. A pilot study of mothers and infants is discussed. (Author/RM)

An investigation of children's ability to convey and respond to requests for action was based on the spontaneous speech of 36 dyads of nursery school children (3;6--5;7). Examinations of the contexts of direct requests indicated that speaker and addressee shared an understanding of the interpersonal meaning factors relevant to requesting.…

This book is a summary of the reports received from the various countries which participated in a conference on native language learning and teaching. The reports are based on questionnaires sent out by the Unesco Institute for Education prior to the meeting. Chapters include a general review of the pre-conference reports, extracts from one of the…

Seven different age levels were used to test the correlation between age and unfilled pauses (UP) and between age and parenthetical remarks (PR) in narratives elicited by visual stimuli. (Author/AM)

Four children, aged 3.9 to 5.5, were recorded talking to different listeners (adult, peer, baby and baby doll) and role-playing a "baby just learning how to talk." As a measure of the children's responsiveness to situational cues, each sample was analyzed for formal and functional characteristics. (Author/RM)

The primary purposes of this study were to investigate the phonetic bases of nonstandard spellings invented by preschool and primary-grade children, to devise appropriate experimental techniques for eliciting judgments of phonetic relationships from young children, to identify the specific characteristics that influence children's categorization…