In a vastly changing world of fast-paced technology and dynamic forms of communication, dialect variance takes on a significant role within the confines of high school classrooms across the country. As educators are tasked with the job of ensuring that students are capable of putting words together into sentences, both in the written and spoken…

Purpose: This study investigates the development of phase locking and frequency representation in infants using the frequency-following response to consonant-vowel syllables. Method: The frequency-following response was recorded in 56 infants and 15 young adults to 2 speech syllables (/ba/ and /ga/), which were presented in randomized order to the…

This paper describes an investigation into the function of child-directed speech (CDS) across development. In the first experiment, 10-21-month-olds were presented with familiar words in CDS and trained on novel words in CDS or adult-directed speech (ADS). All children preferred the matching display for familiar words. However, only older toddlers…

Infants' perception of faces becomes attuned to the environment during the first year of life. However, the mechanisms that underpin perceptual narrowing for faces are only poorly understood. Considering the developmental similarities seen in perceptual narrowing for faces and speech and the role that statistical learning has been shown to play…

This observational study examined the Iranian mothers' interaction with their typically developing children aged 13-18 months during free play at home (n = 40). The first aim was to determine the main type of Iranian maternal verbal responsiveness. Another aim was to investigate the impact of concurrent prediction of maternal verbal responsiveness…

As the culture of the American elementary classroom continues to diversify, teachers' practices must also evolve to best meet the needs of students, specifically, English Learners (ELs). This article encourages elementary educators to include music in their general education curriculum by highlighting the lack of music education in the classroom,…

Ambridge's proposal cannot account for the most basic observations about phonological patterns in human languages. Outside of the earliest stages of phonological production by toddlers, the phonological systems of speakers/learners exhibit internal behaviours that point to the representation and processing of inter-related units ranging in size…

Ambridge calls for exemplar-based accounts of language acquisition. Do modern neural networks such as transformers or word2vec -- which have been extremely successful in modern natural language processing (NLP) applications -- count? Although these models often have ample parametric complexity to store exemplars from their training data, they also…

Children show a remarkable degree of consistency in learning some words earlier than others. What patterns of word usage predict variations among words in age of acquisition? We use distributional analysis of a naturalistic corpus of child-directed speech to create quantitative features representing natural variability in word contexts. We…

Previous research found a beneficial effect of augmentative signs (signs from a sign language used alongside speech) on spoken word learning by signing deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. The present study compared oral DHH children, and hearing children in a condition with babble noise in order to investigate whether prolonged experience…

We explored whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) learn new nouns from overheard speech. Thirteen children (4-5 years) with ASD participated in an Addressed condition, in which they were directly taught a novel label (e.g., "toma") for one of three novel objects, and an Overheard condition, in which the objects and label…

Children's language experiences in the first two years of life are inextricably connected with their current and future language and literacy development. Research has shown that mother-child shared reading of picture books is a practice that can promote this development. Little is known, however, about the shared reading experiences of infants…

Purpose: This study evaluated the effects of an automated, small-group intervention designed to teach preschoolers challenging vocabulary words. Previous studies have provided evidence of efficacy. In this study, we evaluated the effects of the program after doubling the number of words taught from 2 to 4 words per book. Method: Seventeen…

Using the lenses of bilingualism and social justice, I reflect on relevant conceptual and methodological issues encountered in the study of the linguistic development of heritage language speakers. Themes examined include the early but varying timing of heritage language learning; the surrounding linguistic environment, including the link between…

Many children learn language, in part, from the speech of non-native speakers who vary in their language proficiency. To investigate the influence of speaker proficiency on the quality of child-directed speech, 29 mothers who were native English speakers and 31 mothers who were native speakers of Spanish and who reported speaking English to their…