This book provides a holistic overview of what leads to success in foreign language learning at an early age and deepens our understanding of early foreign language learning. The studies use an array of methodological approaches to research learners aged between three and ten, as well as their parents and teachers, in instructional, minimal-input…

The study examined the sensitivity of young children (3-7 years old) and adults to the acoustic variations resulting from a speaker's coarticulation (or coproduction) of phonetic segments. Results indicated perceptual sensitivity to certain coarticulatory effects present as early as three years of age. (Author/DB)

A total of 60 adults and 60 first graders were presented with brief stories and asked to supply the verbal statement (or directive) that would be used by the story character. Results confirmed expectations regarding situational use of directives for neutral-affect story characters. (Author/KS)

The matching-to-sample performances of three young adults with autism and four children (ages four to nine) without intellectual disabilities were examined in three experiments using complex sample stimuli. Results for all subjects showed that each of two redundant relevant sample elements and their respective comparison stimuli were substitutable…

Three experiments tested for developmental changes in attention to auditory and visual signals. Results showed that adults and seven-year-olds tended to allocate their attention to vision rather than audition when no precue was provided. While not entirely consistent, results with four-year-olds suggested a similar biasing of attention to vision.…

Three experiments with young children and adults were performed to examine the development of frequency selectivity and to attempt to separate peripheral versus central contributions to frequency selectivity. Results suggested that the shallow notched-noise, fixed-masker-level functions of four-year-old children are probably a result of poor…

The present study compares the attributions of young children 5 to 6.5 years of age with those of adult subjects 20 to 30 years of age, who were engaged in the same competitive situation. It was hypothesized that sex differences would occur in the sample of adults but not in the sample of children. Believing outcomes to be determined by either…

Two experiments investigated sentence context effects on the naming times of sentence completion words by third-grade children and college students. The semantic acceptability of the word in the sentence context had a much greater influence on children's word identification times than adults'. (Author/CB)

Five experiments investigated whether the cued recall of children and adults differed for classified events featuring different category and relation types. Recall for events differed strongly for children and adults. Differences were attributed to properties of the internal structure of event representation in memory. (SKC)

This study examined possible influences of utterance length and complexity on speech motor performance with eight 5-year-old children and eight young adults using the spatiotemporal index (STI), a measure of stability of lip movement over phrase repetitions. The STI was significantly higher in the complex sentence condition and for the younger…

Investigated the role of memory development, especially the developmental change in reported general and specific memories, in children's and adults' concepts of themselves. The proportion of general responses was found to be high and stable across all ages; the proportion of specific responses increased with age. (PCB)

In two experiments 96 children and eight adults were tested for comprehension of the modifier-head relation in compounds such as apple-knife or were asked to label objects with compounds. Results show that by age three children reliably interpret novel compounds and made use of novel compounds to subcategorize. (RH)

Examined the effects of rounded and unrounded vowels on the perception of the voiceless fricatives "s" and "sh" by adults and by young children who could and could not produce both sounds. Concluded that productive mastery is not critically responsible for perception of the distinction between the two phonemes or the…

Assessed the effect of the amount of physical detail in pictures on the picture recognition memory of 7- and 9-year-olds, young adults, and adults over 68. For each age group, recognition accuracy was significantly higher for pictures presented in the simple rather than the complex form. (PCB)

A 2-alternative forced-choice task was used to measure the ability of 18 children (ages 3 to 5) to detect varying levels of sinusoids in noise. Results showed that, on average, the children's thresholds were higher and the slopes of their psychometric functions were shallower than those of adults, though between-subjects variability was large.…