The current study investigates the learning of nonnative suprasegmental patterns for word identification. Native English-speaking adults learned to use suprasegmentals (pitch patterns) to identify a vocabulary of six English pseudosyllables superimposed with three pitch patterns (18 words). Successful learning of the vocabulary necessarily…

Previous studies have shown a correlation between working memory (WM) and syntactic complexity (variously defined) in language comprehension. The present study investigates this relationship in spontaneous language production, proposing a novel metric, informed by language development and disorders, where complexity is construed in terms of those…

It is cross-linguistically common for languages to undergo a diachronic increase in the range of adverbial notions that can be expressed by means of infinitival constructions, and the Romance languages are a good example of this process. Examining the development of adverbial "prepositional infinitive" constructions in Spanish, Portuguese and…

Research over the past 50 years has yielded several promising approaches and many specific intervention techniques designed to enhance the communication and language development of young children with intellectual and developmental delays and disabilities. Yet virtually no systematic research has been conducted on the effects of different…

How does the development and consolidation of perceptual, attentional, and higher cognitive abilities interact with language acquisition and processing? We explored children's (ages 5-17) and adults' (ages 18-51) comprehension of morphosyntactically varied sentences under several competing speech conditions that varied in the degree of attentional…

This study addresses the question of whether language dominance and cross-linguistic influence are related by investigating the acquisition of determiner omission in four bilingual German-Italian children. The study begins by showing that monolingual Italian learners omit determiners less extensively than monolingual German learners. If bilingual…

This study investigated vocal cues that differentiate sarcastic utterances from non-sarcastic utterances. Utterances were drawn from videotapes of participant interviews and arranged on a master tape for analysis. Utterances that were identified as sarcastic by speakers and recognized as sarcastic by listeners were randomly arranged with…

Recent research on early word learning suggests that children's behavior when-generalizing novel nouns integrates their prior vocabulary knowledge with the specifics of the task. This study examines how these factors interact on the moment-to-moment time scale of the training children receive and the sequence of stimuli they are shown. In 1…

Purpose: Onset of canonical babbling by 10 months of age is surprisingly robust in infancy, suggesting that there must be deep biological forces that keep the development of this key vocal capability on course. This study further evaluated the robustness of canonical babbling and other aspects of prelinguistic vocal development. Method:…

Much developmental work has been devoted to "scalar implicatures." These are implicitly communicated propositions linked to relatively weak terms (consider how "Some" pragmatically implies "Not all") that are more likely to be carried out by adults than by children. Children tend to retain the linguistically encoded…

Purpose: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) lag behind children with typical language (TL) in their grammatical development, despite equivalent early exposure to recasts in conversation (M. E. Fey, T. E. Krulik, D. F. Loeb, & K. Proctor-Williams, 1999) and the ability to learn from recasts in intervention as quickly as do children…

This article describes the language patterns of eight preschool students in a computer environment. Videotaped interactions at the computer center were analyzed to examine the nature of the verbal interaction that took place among peers. Using Halliday's functional framework, the authors found that regulatory was the most popular language pattern,…

The present study focuses on noun and verb processing during language acquisition, whereby the word production and the word comprehension of preschool children of different ages were investigated across three languages. Two hypotheses were put forward: first, given that languages differ with respect to the clarity of the noun-verb distinction and…

This article presents an analysis of the functional roles of "baby signing" in three hearing families in the United States, as well as a discussion of the social and ideological implications of the practice. Baby signing fits neatly into the parenting ideologies prevalent in the professional class in the United States that value early…

Language is a fantastic gift: it empowers humans to create new ways of speaking with, for and to others about any topic or experience. Language is a rule-governed, meaningful communication system. It is a symbol system, where a word or phrase stands for or represents something else that can be touched, thought about, seen, heard, felt, done,…