Before infants can learn words, they must identify those words in continuous speech. Yet, the speech signal lacks obvious boundary markers, which poses a potential problem for language acquisition (Swingley, "Philos Trans R Soc Lond. Series B, Biol Sci" 364(1536), 3617-3632, 2009). By the middle of the first year, infants seem to have…

This study investigated the effect of semantic information on artificial grammar learning (AGL). Recursive grammars of different complexity levels (regular language, mirror language, copy language) were investigated in a series of AGL experiments. In the with-semantics condition, participants acquired semantic information prior to the AGL…

By the time they reach early adulthood, English speakers are familiar with the meaning of thousands of words. In the last decades, computational simulations known as distributional semantic models (DSMs) have demonstrated that it is possible to induce word meaning representations solely from word co-occurrence statistics extracted from a large…

Previous research shows that word segmentation is a language-specific skill. Here, we tested segmentation of bi-syllabic words in two languages (French; English) within the same infants in a single test session. In Experiment 1, monolingual 8-month-olds (French; English) segmented bi-syllabic words in their native language, but not in an…

Purpose: In this article, we review the role of retrieval practice on the word learning and retention of children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Following a brief review of earlier findings on word learning in children with SLI and the assumptions behind retrieval practice, four experiments are described that compared novel words…

The ability to compute non-adjacent regularities is key in the acquisition of a new language. In the domain of phonology/phonotactics, sensitivity to non-adjacent regularities between consonants has been found to appear between 7 and 10 months. The present study focuses on the emergence of a posterior-anterior (PA) bias, a regularity involving two…

The experimenter conducted three experiments to compare incidental language acquisition of familiar and non-familiar stimuli, and asses the effects of specific pairing experiences on the emergence of bidirectional naming (BiN) for familiar and non-familiar stimuli. In Experiment I the experimenter assessed the numbers of accurate untaught listener…

English has a word-minimality requirement that all open-class lexical items must contain at least two moras of structure, forming a bimoraic foot (Hayes, 1995).Thus, a word with either a long vowel, or a short vowel and a coda consonant, satisfies this requirement. This raises the question of when and how young children might learn this…

An experimental study was conducted on children aged 2;6-3;0 and 3;6-4;0 investigating the priming effect of two WANT-constructions to establish whether constructional competition contributes to English-speaking children's infinitival to omission errors (e.g., *"I want ___ jump now"). In two between-participant groups, children either…

This paper investigates whether three-year-olds are able to process attributive adjectives (e.g., "soft pillow") as they hear them and to predict the noun ("pillow") on the basis of the adjective meaning ("soft"). This was investigated in an experiment by means of the Visual World Paradigm. The participants saw two…

Phonotactics--constraints on the position and combination of speech sounds within syllables--are subject to statistical differences that gradiently affect speaker and listener behavior (e.g., Vitevitch & Luce, 1999). What statistical properties drive the acquisition of such constraints? Because they are naturally highly correlated, previous…

The literature on human and animal learning suggests that individuals attend to and act on cues differently based on the order in which they were learned. Recent studies have proposed that one specific type of learning outcome, the highlighting effect, can serve as a framework for understanding a number of early cognitive milestones. However,…

Many English-speaking children use plural nominal forms in spontaneous speech before the age of two, and display some understanding of plural inflection in production tasks. However, results from an intermodal preferential study suggested a lack of "comprehension" of nominal plural morphology at 24 months of age (Kouider, Halberda, Wood,…

Extracting general rules from specific examples is important, as we must face the same challenge displayed in various formats. Previous studies have found that bimodal presentation of grammar-like rules (e.g. ABA) enhanced 5-month-olds' capacity to acquire a rule that infants failed to learn when the rule was presented with visual presentation of…

This study investigates the development of metalinguistic skills, particularly ambiguity detection, and whether training accelerates this development for prereaders in kindergarten (5;5-6;6). It is the first to compare homophone detection with lexically ambiguous sentence detection in which the same homophones appear. The experimental group…