Child-directed speech has long been known to influence children's vocabulary learning. However, while we know that caregiver utterances differ from those directed at adults in various ways, little is known about any differences in the lexical properties of child-directed and adult-directed utterances. We compare over half a million word tokens…

This study aimed to adapt and validate the Word Complexity Measure (WCM) for Persian-speaking toddlers. The WCM is a tool for assessing phonological complexity, originally proposed by Stoel-Gammon. The study was conducted in two phases: (1) adapting the WCM parameters to the Persian language and (2) conducting a validation study with 60…

The Mayan language Mam uses complex predicates to express events. Complex predicates map multiple semantic elements onto a single word, and consequently have a blend of lexical and phrasal features. The chameleon-like nature of complex predicates provides a window on children's ability to express phrasal combinations at the one-word stage of…

Dutch and German employ voicing contrasts, but Dutch lacks the 'voiced' dorsal plosive /g/. We exploited this accidental phonological gap, measuring the presence of prevoicing and voice onset time durations during speech production to determine (1) whether preliterate bilingual Dutch-German and monolingual Dutch-speaking children aged 3;6-6;0…

Exemplar-based learning requires: (1) a segmentation procedure for identifying the units of past experiences that a present experience can be compared to, and (2) a similarity function for comparing these past experiences to the present experience. This article argues that for a learner to learn a language these two mechanisms will require…

This study aims to evaluate phonological competences and their correlations with lexical abilities in 2-year-old Italian-speaking children. Eighty-eight children (46 females) aged 25-32 months participated in the study. From the total sample, three subgroups of children with different lexical skills were extracted to identify phonological…

Studies on the acquisition of Spanish as a first language do not agree on the patterns and factors relevant for coda development. In order to shed light on the questions involved, a longitudinal study of coda development in Northern European Spanish was carried out to explore the relationship between accuracy, markedness and frequency. The study…

The aim of this study was to examine the influence of phonotactic probability (PP) and neighbourhood density (ND) on pseudoword learning in 17 Dutch-speaking typically developing children (mean age 7;2). They were familiarized with 16 one-syllable pseudowords varying in PP (high vs low) and ND (high vs low) via a storytelling procedure. The…

In early word productions, the same types of errors are manifest in children with cochlear implants (CI) as in their normally hearing (NH) peers with respect to consonant clusters. However, the incidence of those types and their longitudinal development have not been examined or quantified in the literature thus far. Furthermore, studies on the…

This study reports on the acquisition of quantity contrasts in Guina-ang Bontok, an indigenous language spoken in the Philippines. Four-year-old and 5-year-old children's perception and production of quantity contrasts were examined using a pair of names that contrast in the quantity of the medial nasal. Frequencies of the quantity contrast were…

Students in South East Asia often struggle with English /l/ and /r/. This study therefore set out to examine how Taiwanese pupils' perception of these sounds is influenced by cross-language effects. Most Taiwanese students have Mandarin as L1 and Taiwanese as L2 or vice versa, and English as L3. A same-different discrimination experiment was…

Language learners have to acquire the phonological grammar of their native language, and different levels of representations on which the grammar operates. Developmental dyslexia is associated with a phonological deficit, which is commonly assumed to stem from degraded phonological representations. The present study investigates one aspect of the…

Children develop linguistic competencies during interactions with more knowledgeable others. Consequently, one way to support this development is by enhancing the home literacy environment (HLE) in which children live. In this study a non-intensive intervention procedure was developed to improve HLE and linguistic competencies of 125 German…