Foreign accents can vary considerably in the degree to which they deviate from the listener's native accent, but little is known about how the relationship between a speaker's accent and a listener's native language phonology mediates adaptation. Using an artificial accent methodology, we addressed this issue by constructing a set of three…

A talking face provides redundant cues on the mouth that might support language learning and highly salient social cues in the eyes. What drives children's looking toward the mouth versus eyes of a talking face? This study reports data from 292 children who viewed faces speaking English, French, and Russian. We investigated the impact of…

Analyses of elicited pantomime, primarily of English-speaking children, show that preschool-aged children are more likely to symbolically represent an object with gestures depicting an object's form rather than its function. In contrast, anecdotal reports of spontaneous gesture production in younger children suggest that children use multiple…

Children today are growing up in a digital world that is changing and advancing at an unprecedented rate. While some adults may struggle to keep up with new technological gadgets, we find our very young may be quite at ease with the use of digital technologies, even before learning to speak. This study builds on a foundation of family literacy…

This paper reports on a case study of a child raised in the context of bilingual first-language acquisition in English and Bulgarian, where the latter represents a minority (heritage) language. Using diary data and spontaneous speech recordings, the study identifies a period of loss of production in Bulgarian (1;7-2;3) and a subsequent…

Examined language differentiation in bilingual toddlers prior to the emergence of functional categories. The children were observed with each parent separately and both together. Results indicate that while these children did code mix, they were able to differentiate between their two languages. There was some evidence that language dominance…