All languages employ certain phonetic contrasts when distinguishing words. Infant speech perception is rapidly attuned to these contrasts before many words are learned, thus phonetic attunement is thought to proceed independently of lexical and referential knowledge. Here, evidence to the contrary is provided. Ninety-eight 9-month-old…

There is a growing need for more information regarding the early academic development of preschool-age children who are learning to speak Spanish and English. To achieve this, studies are needed that acknowledge the heterogeneity of language abilities within bilingual preschool children, and that these variations in language abilities may impact…

Many studies have examined language acquisition under morphosyntactic or semantic inconsistency, but few have considered "word-form" inconsistency. Many young learners encounter word-form inconsistency due to accent variation in their communities. The current study asked how preschoolers recognize accent-variants of newly learned words.…

Research Findings: The current study reports on the results of a longitudinal investigation of the language and early literacy development of a sample of dual-language learners (DLLs) and monolingual English speakers from low-income families who received an Early Reading First intervention during their Head Start preschool year. A total of 62…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether children exposed to 2 languages would benefit from the phonotactic probability cues of a single language in the same way as monolingual peers and to determine whether crosslinguistic influence would be present in a fast-mapping task. Method: Two groups of typically developing children…