Despite arguments for the relative ease of learning common noun meanings, semantic development continues well past the early years of language acquisition even for names of concrete objects. We studied evolution of the use of common nouns during later lexical development. Children aged 5-14 years and adults named common household objects and their…

We found that infant gaze following and pointing predicts subsequent language development. At ages 0 ; 10 or 0 ; 11, infants saw an adult turn to look at an object in an experimental setting. Productive vocabulary was assessed longitudinally through two years of age. Growth curve modeling showed that infants who gaze followed and looked longer at…

This study seeks to uncover the characteristics of foreign language instructors' discourse styles implemented in the classroom when teaching students the target language. Foreign language classrooms are unique to academia because the teachers of the language, depending on whether they are native or non-native speakers of the target language,…

"The Analysis of Verbal Behavior" ("TAVB") publishes experimental and theoretical papers relevant to a behavioral analysis of language. Normand, Fossa, and Poling (2000) reviewed the published studies in "TAVB" across several dimensions and found that despite the growth of the journal, most articles published in "TAVB" from 1982 to 1998 were…

Speechreading is a visual communicative skill for perceiving speech. In this study, we tested the effects of speech experience and deafness on the speechreading neural network in normal hearing controls and in two groups of deaf patients who became deaf either before (prelingual deafness) or after (postlingual deafness) auditory language…

Research over the past several decades has provided insight into the processes that govern early brain development and how those processes contribute to behavior. In this article, the authors provide an overview of early brain development beginning with a summary of the prenatal period. They then turn to postnatal development and examine how brain…

Two experiments explored the neural mechanisms underlying the learning and consolidation of novel spoken words. In Experiment 1, participants learned two sets of novel words on successive days. A subsequent recognition test revealed high levels of familiarity for both sets. However, a lexical decision task showed that only novel words learned on…

Complexity, accuracy, and fluency have proved useful measures of second language performance. The present article will re-examine these measures themselves, arguing that fluency needs to be rethought if it is to be measured effectively, and that the three general measures need to be supplemented by measures of lexical use. Building upon this…

Segalowitz and Segalowitz distinguish between "speedup" (mean reaction time [RT] and mean standard deviation of responses in an RT task decrease to the same degree) and "automatization" (mean standard deviation decreases more than mean RT). The coefficient of variation, which is the standard deviation divided by the mean RT, decreases in the case…

This study examines pragmatic differentiation in early trilingual development through a longitudinal analysis of language choice in a developing Tagalog-Spanish-English trilingual child. The child's patterns of language choice with different language users are analyzed at age 1 ; 10 and 2 ; 4 to examine: (1) whether evidence for pragmatic…

Conversations are a primary tool for language development in preschool classrooms. Unfortunately, opportunities to have meaningful conversations between children and adults may not exist in preschool classrooms, especially those that serve children from high poverty contexts. Conversation Stations were implemented in preschool classrooms to ensure…

This paper investigates whether any difference exists in the degree of second language attrition between two siblings in terms of grammatical complexity, grammatical accuracy, lexical complexity, and lexical productivity based on their storytelling data collected over the period of 31 months. The subjects' L1 and L2 are Japanese and English,…

One of the central themes in the study of language acquisition is the gap between the linguistic knowledge that learners demonstrate, and the apparent inadequacy of linguistic input to support induction of this knowledge. One of the first linguistic abilities in the course of development to exemplify this problem is in speech perception:…

This cross-linguistic study investigated Semantic Verbal Fluency (SVF) performance in 30 American English-speaking and 30 Finnish-speaking healthy elderly adults with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Despite the different backgrounds of the participant groups, remarkable similarities were found between the groups in the overall SVF…

Previous research has demonstrated that infants under 17 months have difficulty learning novel words in the laboratory when the words differ by only one consonant sound, irrespective of the magnitude of that difference. The current study explored whether 15-month-old infants can learn novel words that differ in only one vowel sound. The rich…