Theories of language processing differ with respect to the role of abstract syntax and semantics vs surface-level lexical co-occurrence (n-gram) frequency. The contribution of each of these factors has been demonstrated in previous studies of children and adults, but none have investigated them jointly. This study evaluated the role of all three…

Several studies investigated preschoolers' ability to compute scalar and ad-hoc implicatures, but only one compared children's performance with both kinds of implicature with the same task, a picture selection task. In Experiment 1 (N = 58, age: 4;2-6;0), we first show that the truth value judgment task, traditionally employed to investigate…

Pierce "et al." (2017) have proposed that variations in the timing, quality and quantity of language input during the earliest stages of development are related to variations in the development of phonological working memory and, in turn, to later language learning outcomes. To examine this hypothesis, three groups of children who are…

Researchers agree that early literacy activities, like book sharing and parent-child play, are important for stimulating language development. We hypothesize that book sharing is most powerful because it elicits more interactive talk in young children than other activities. Parents of 43 infants (9-18 months) made two daylong audio recordings…

The generalisation of linguistic constructions is performed through analogical reasoning. Children with developmental language disorders (DLD) are impaired in analogical reasoning and in generalisation. However, these processes are improved by an input involving variability and similarity. Here we investigated the performance of children with or…

Multiword units play an important role in language learning and use. It was proposed that learning from such units can facilitate mastery of certain grammatical relations, and that children and adults differ in their use of multiword units during learning, contributing to their varying language-learning trajectories. Accordingly, adults learn…

Previous research has shown that the quality of mother-child interactions between pre-term children and their mothers tends to be poorer than that of full-term children and their mothers (Forcada-Guex, Pierrehumbert, Borghini, Moessinger & Muller-Nix, 2006). Mothers of pre-term children are less responsive and more intrusive in interactions…

Using a semi-spontaneous speech corpus, we present evidence from computational modelling of tonal productions from Mandarin-speaking children (4- to 11-years old) and adults, showing that children exceed the adult-level tonal distinction at the age of 7 to 8 years using F0 cues, but do not reach the high adult-level distinction using spectral cues…

Behavioral and neural evidence indicates that young children who engage in more conversations with their parents have better later language skills such as vocabulary and academic language abilities. Previous studies find that the extent to which parents engage in conversational turn-taking with children varies considerably. How, then, can we…

We analysed both structural and functional aspects of sentences containing the four adverbials "after", "before", "because", and "if" in two dense corpora of parent-child interactions from two British English-acquiring children (2;00-4;07). In comparing mothers' and children's usage we separate out the…

The Cross-linguistic Lexical Task (CLT; Haman, Luniewska & Pomiechowska, 2015) is a vocabulary task designed to enable cross-linguistic comparisons both across and within (bilingual) children. In this paper we assessed the validity of the CLT as a measure of language proficiency in bilingual children, by determining the extent to which: (1)…

While voicing contrasts in word-onset position are acquired relatively early, much less is known about how and when they are acquired in word-coda position, where accurate production of these contrasts is also critical for distinguishing words (e.g., dog vs. dock). This study examined how the acoustic cues to coda voicing contrasts are realized in…

Children's differing learning trajectories cross-linguistically have been at the forefront of gender acquisition research, often with conflicting results and conclusions. As a result, the source of children's different learning behaviors in gender acquisition has been unclear. I argue that children's gender acquisition is driven by the search for…

This study examined the roles of parental gender and context in the communicative functions of parents' child-directed speech. Seventy three families with toddlers participated in the study. Dyadic and triadic parent-toddler interactions were videotaped during structured play activities. Results indicated context-dependent variability in parents'…

The functions of acoustic-phonetic modifications in infant-directed speech (IDS) remain a question: do they specifically serve to facilitate language learning via enhanced phonemic contrasts (the hyperarticulation hypothesis) or primarily to improve communication via prosodic exaggeration (the prosodic hypothesis)? The study of lexical tones…