In a seminal study, Cameron-Faulkner et al. made two important observations about utterance-level constructions in English child-directed speech (CDS). First, they observed that canonical in/transitive sentences are surprisingly infrequent in child-direct speech (given that SVO word order is often thought to play a key role in the acquisition of…

Purpose: Conversational entrainment is the tendency for individuals to modify their behavior to more closely converge with the behavior of their communication partner and is an important aspect of successful interaction. Evidence of entrainment in adults is robust, yet research regarding its development in children is sparse. Here, we investigate…

Purpose: This study examines the effect of age on language use with an automated analysis of digitized speech obtained from semistructured, narrative speech samples. Method: We examined the Cookie Theft picture descriptions produced by 37 older and 76 young healthy participants. Using modern natural language processing and automatic speech…

Differences in the ways that men and women use language have long been of interest in the study of discourse. Despite extensive theorizing, actual empirical investigations have yet to converge on a coherent picture of gender differences in language. A significant reason is the lack of agreement over the best way to analyze language. In this…

Examined association between speech rate and memory span in children from kindergarten to sixth grade. Found that speech rate for word triples shared variance with memory span independent of speech rate for single words. Speech rate for word triples was largely redundant with age in explaining additional variation in memory span when effects of…

Investigated effects of age and sociability on school children's private speech during independent school assignments. Findings from 113 public school children in kindergarten through fourth grade revealed main effect for grade level. Found linear trend, indicating that, as children progressed from kindergarten to fourth grade, their task-relevant…

Discusses a quantitative study of the use of Australian Questioning Intonation (AQI) in Sydney, which reveals that it has the social distribution characteristic of a language change in progress. The social motivations of AQI are examined in terms of local identity and the entry of new ethnic groups into the community. (Author/SED)

Ten mothers and 20 children, aged 5 and 10 years, were examined to determine the time at which velopharyngeal port opening began in /dVn/ syllables and velopharyngeal port closing reached completion in /nVd/ syllables. Adults and children nasalized most vowels in the /dVn/ context and the /nVd context. (Author/JDD)

A study examined the long- and short-term spectral characteristics of speech simultaneously recorded at the ear and at a reference microphone position. Twenty adults and 26 children (ages 2-4) produced 9 short sentences. Children's vocal levels were low in amplitude at both the ear and at the microphone position. (Contains references.) (CR)

This study examined the way medical clinicians speak about numbers in orally presenting the results of research. Presentations by a sample of eight physicians and surgeons were selected and the manner in which numerical data on the slides were referred to was analyzed. Overall in the sample, it was four times more common to speak about data on…

Examined the speech patterns of three- to eight-year-old children. Results showed that the children most often used "ah" phenomena and unfilled pauses as do adults. "Ah" phenomena showed a significant increase with age, especially between five and six among the females. (SRT)

Examines predictors of accent transfer from L1 to L2 in a group whose acquisition of English as a second language had begun at ages ranging from 6 to 15 plus. Discusses effects of age on L2 acquisition, adding that the only other strong factor was whether L2 was used in the home. (Author/MES)

Investigated the developmental processes that lead from a literal interpretation of idiomatic expressions to the ability to comprehend and produce them figuratively. Results showed that younger children are more literally oriented than older children, who in turn are more idiomatically oriented, and that children of both age groups found it more…