Most young children begin developing language skills at a rapid pace, early in their lives. Children with Down syndrome, the most common known genetic cause of intellectual disability, typically experience delays in language development that persist as they grow older. Parents and teachers can naturally reinforce the language skills of a child…

This paper investigated children's ability to use syntactic structures to infer semantic information. The particular syntax-semantics link examined was the one between transitivity (transitive/intransitive structures) and telicity (telic/atelic perspectives; that is, boundedness). Although transitivity is an important syntactic reflex of telicity,…

Upon witnessing a causal event, do children's gestures encode causal knowledge that (a) does not appear in their linguistic descriptions or (b) conveys the same information as their sentential expressions? The former use of gesture is considered supplementary; the latter is considered reinforcing. Sixty-four English-speaking children aged 2.5-5…

The study compared the vocal production and language learning environments of 26 young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to 78 typically developing children using measures derived from automated vocal analysis. A digital language processor and audio-processing algorithms measured the amount of adult words to children and the amount of…

The present work examined the discovery of linguistic cues during a word segmentation task. Whereas previous studies have focused on sensitivity to individual cues, this study addresses how individual cues may be used to discover additional, correlated cues. Twenty-four 9-month-old infants were familiarized with a speech stream in which…

This paper reports progress in developing a computer model of language acquisition in the form of (1) a generative grammar that is (2) algorithmically learnable from realistic corpus data, (3) viable in its large-scale quantitative performance and (4) psychologically real. First, we describe new algorithmic methods for unsupervised learning of…

Corpora of child language are essential for research in child language acquisition and psycholinguistics. Linguistic annotation of the corpora provides researchers with better means for exploring the development of grammatical constructions and their usage. We describe a project whose goal is to annotate the English section of the CHILDES database…

We investigated whether access to a sign language affects the development of pragmatic competence in three groups of deaf children aged 6 to 11 years: native signers from deaf families receiving bimodal/bilingual instruction, native signers from deaf families receiving oralist instruction and late signers from hearing families receiving oralist…

When they see a familiar object and an unfamiliar one, and are asked to select the referent of a novel label, children usually choose the unfamiliar object. We asked whether this "disambiguation effect" reflects an expectation that each object has just one label (mutual exclusivity), or an expectation about the intent of the speaker who uses a…

Electronic media--whether child-oriented videos and games or background television--is increasingly embedded in young children's lives, raising questions of its impact on children's language skills. New research presents a multitextured picture of how different types of e-media--depending on content, context, and a child's age--can help and hurt.…

Experimental studies demonstrate that contrast helps toddlers to extend the meanings of novel adjectives. This study explores whether antonym co-occurrence in spontaneous speech also has an effect on adjective use by the child. The authors studied adjective production in longitudinal speech samples from 16 children (16-36 months) acquiring eight…

A longitudinal analysis is presented of the fillers of a Dutch-speaking child between 1;10 and 2;7. Our analysis corroborates familiar regularities reported in the literature: most fillers resemble articles in shape and distribution, and are affected by rhythmic and positional constraints. A novel finding is the impact of the lexical environment:…

This dissertation examines three processes affecting consonants in child speech: harmony (long-distance assimilation) involving major place features as in "coat" [kouk]; long-distance metathesis as in "cup" [p[wedge]k]; and initial consonant deletion as in "fish" [is]. These processes are unattested in adult phonology, leading to proposals for…

Semantic roles are a critical aspect of linguistic knowledge because they indicate the relations of the participants in an event to the main predicate. Experimental studies on children and adults show that both groups use associations between general semantic roles such as Agent and Theme, and grammatical positions such as Subject and Object, even…

There are numerous models of how speech segmentation may proceed in infants acquiring their first language. We present a framework for considering the relative merits and limitations of these various approaches. We then present a model of speech segmentation that aims to reveal important sources of information for speech segmentation, and to…