The environment in which infants learn language is multimodal and rich with social cues. Yet, the effects of such cues, such as eye contact, on early speech perception have not been closely examined. This study assessed the role of ostensive speech, signalled through the speaker's eye gaze direction, on infants' word segmentation abilities. A…

Two word-learning experiments were conducted to investigate the understanding of negative sentences in 18- and 24-month-old children. In Experiment 1, after learning that "bamoule" means "penguin" and "pirdaling" means "cartwheeling," 18-month-olds (n = 48) increased their looking times when listening to…

Children's gaze behavior reflects emergent linguistic knowledge and real-time language processing of speech, but little is known about naturalistic gaze behaviors while watching signed narratives. Measuring gaze patterns in signing children could uncover how they master perceptual gaze control during a time of active language learning. Gaze…

Typically developing (TD) infants adapt to the social world in part by shifting the focus of their processing resources to the relevant aspects of a visual scene. Any impairment in visual orienting may therefore constrain learning and development in domains such as language. However, although something is known about visual orienting in infants at…

Sleep is known to support the neocortical consolidation of declarative memory, including the acquisition of new language. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is often characterized by both sleep and language learning difficulties, but few studies have explored a potential connection between the two. Here, 54 children with and without ASD (matched on…

Infant language learning depends on the distribution of co-occurrences "within" language--between words and other words--and "between" language content and events in the world. Yet infant-directed speech is not limited to words that refer to perceivable objects and actions. Rather, caregivers' utterances contain a range of…

Vocabulary differences early in development are highly predictive of later language learning as well as achievement in school. Early word learning emerges in the context of tightly coupled social interactions between the early learner and a mature partner. In the present study, we develop and apply a novel paradigm--dual head-mounted eye…

When children interpret spoken language in real time, linguistic information drives rapid shifts in visual attention to objects in the visual world. This language-vision interaction can provide insights into children's developing efficiency in language comprehension. But how does language influence visual attention when the linguistic signal and…

Bilingual infants show an extended period of looking at the mouth of talking faces, which provides them with additional articulatory cues that can be used to boost the challenging situation of learning two languages (Pons, Bosch & Lewkowicz, 2015). However, the eye region also provides fundamental cues for emotion perception and recognition,…

A central component of language development is word learning. One characterization of this process is that language learners discover objects and then look for word forms to associate with these objects (Mcnamara, 1984; Smith, 2000). Another possibility is that word forms themselves are also important, such that once learned, hearing a familiar…

Despite its importance in the development of children's skills of social cognition and communication, very little is known about the ontogenetic origins of the pointing gesture. We report a training study in which mothers gave children one month of extra daily experience with pointing as compared with a control group who had extra experience with…

Contrasting results have been reported regarding the phonetic acquisition of bilinguals. A lack of discrimination has been observed for certain native contrasts in 8-month-old Catalan-Spanish bilingual infants (Bosch & Sebastian-Galles, 2003a), though not in French-English bilingual infants (Burns, Yoshida, Hill & Werker, 2007; Sundara, Polka &…

Recent studies show that both adults and young children possess powerful statistical learning capabilities to solve the word-to-world mapping problem. However, the underlying mechanisms that make statistical learning possible and powerful are not yet known. With the goal of providing new insights into this issue, the research reported in this…

This paper presents follow-up longitudinal data to research that previously suggested the possibility of abnormal gaze behavior marked by decreased eye contact in a subgroup of 6-month-old infants at risk for autism (Merin, Young, Ozonoff & Rogers, 2007). Using eye-tracking data and behavioral data recorded during a live mother-infant interaction…

Using a preferential looking methodology with novel verbs, Gertner, Fisher and Eisengart (2006 ) found that 21-month-old English children seemed to understand the syntactic marking of transitive word order in an abstract, verb-general way. In the current study we tested whether young German children of this same age have this same understanding.…