Cross-linguistically, languages allow a wider variety of phonotactic patterns in onsets than in codas. However, the variability of phonotactic patterns in coda position in different languages suggests these patterns must, at least in part, be learned. Two experiments were conducted to explore whether there is an asymmetry in English-learning…

Recent work has demonstrated that the addition of multiple talkers during habituation improves 14-month-olds' performance in the switch task (Rost & McMurray, 2009). While the authors suggest that this boost in performance is due to the increase in acoustic variability (Rost & McMurray, 2010), it is also possible that there is…

Across languages and event types (i.e., agentive and nonagentive motion, transfer, change of state, attach/detach), goal paths are privileged over source paths in the linguistic encoding of events. Furthermore, some linguistic analyses suggest that goal paths are more central than source paths in the semantic and syntactic structure of motion…

In spontaneous conversations between adults, words are often pronounced with fewer segments or syllables than their citation forms. The question arises whether infant-directed speech also contains phonetic reduction. If so, infants would be presented with speech input that enables them to acquire reduced variants from an early age. This study…

Joint attention between hearing children and their caregivers is typically achieved when the adult provides spoken, auditory linguistic input that relates to the child's current visual focus of attention. Deaf children interacting through sign language must learn to continually switch visual attention between people and objects in order to…

Young infants can learn statistical regularities and patterns in sequences of events. Studies have demonstrated a relationship between early sequence learning skills and later development of cognitive and language skills. We investigated the relation between infants' visual response speed to novel event sequences, and their later receptive…

F[subscript 0]-based acoustic measures were extracted from a brief, sentence-final target word spoken during structured play interactions between mothers and their 3- to 14-month-old infants and were analyzed based on demographic variables and DSM-IV Axis-I clinical diagnoses and their common modifiers. F[subscript 0] range (?F[subscript 0]) was…

Many studies have examined language acquisition under morphosyntactic or semantic inconsistency, but few have considered "word-form" inconsistency. Many young learners encounter word-form inconsistency due to accent variation in their communities. The current study asked how preschoolers recognize accent-variants of newly learned words.…

The early relationship between children's emerging articulatory abilities and their capacity to process speech input was investigated, following recent studies with English-learning infants. Twenty-six monolingual Italian-learning infants were tested at 6 months (no consistent and stable use of consonants, or vocal motor schemes [VMS]) and at…

Examination of infant vocalization patterns across interactive and noninteractive contexts may facilitate better understanding of early communication development. In the current study, with 24 infant-parent dyads, infant volubility increased significantly when parent interaction ceased (presenting a "still face," or SF) after a period of…

Previous research indicates that infants generalize syntactic-like structures to novel exemplars in a way that has been characterized as abstract and algebraic (Marcus et al., 1999). Infants appear to learn and generalize from speech more successfully than from nonspeech stimuli (Marcus, Fernandes, & Johnson, 2007). In this series of experiments,…

Transitional Probability (TP) computations are regarded as a powerful learning mechanism that is functional early in development and has been proposed as an initial bootstrapping device for speech segmentation. However, a recent study casts doubt on the robustness of early statistical word-learning. Johnson and Tyler (2010) showed that when…

Much of the research on object individuation in infancy has used a task in which two different objects emerge in alternation from behind a large screen, which is then removed to reveal either one or two objects. In their seminal work, Xu and Carey (1996) found that it is typically not until the end of the first year that infants detect a violation…

The social-pragmatic theory of language acquisition proposes that children only become efficient at learning the meanings of words once they acquire the ability to understand the intentions of other agents, in particular the intention to communicate (Akhtar & Tomasello, 2000). In this paper we present a neural network model of word learning which…

We expand upon a previous proposal by Bloom and Wynn (1997) that young children learn about the meaning of number words by tracking their occurrence in particular syntactic environments, in combination with the discourse context in which they are used. An analysis of the Childes database (MacWhinney, 2000) reveals that the environments studied by…