This paper provides an overview of the features of caregiver input that facilitate language learning across early childhood. We discuss three dimensions of input quality: interactive, linguistic, and conceptual. All three types of input features have been shown to predict children's language learning, though perhaps through somewhat different…

Caregiver speech is not a static collection of utterances, but occurs in "conversational exchanges," in which caregiver and child dynamically influence each other's speech. We investigate (a) whether children and caregivers modulate the prosody of their speech as a function of their interlocutor's speech, and (b) the influence of the…

Studies on the relationship between bookreading and language development typically lack data about which books are actually read to children. This paper reports on an Internet survey designed to address this data gap. The resulting dataset (the Infant Bookreading Database or IBDb) includes responses from 1,107 caregivers of children aged 0-36…

A fundamental question in language acquisition research is whether young children have abstract grammatical representations. We tested this question experimentally. French-learning 30-month-olds were first taught novel word-object pairs in the context of a gender-marked determiner (e.g., un[subscript MASC]ravole "a ravole"). Test trials…

The acquisition of noun gender on articles was studied in a sample of 21 young German-speaking children. Longitudinal spontaneous speech data were used. Data analysis is based on 22 two-hourly speech samples per child from 6 children between 1 ; 4 and 3 ; 8 and on 5 two-hourly speech samples per child from 15 children between 1 ; 4 and 2 ; 10. The…

Do infants and young children possess implicit theory of mind that is revealed through their communicative interactions, or are they simply treating their interlocutors as objects to manipulate in service to their own material ends? Paper reviews additional evidence indicating infants in second year of life are capable of communicating for sake of…

Three mother-child dyads were videotaped in a free play setting when children were two- and three-years old. Children's spontaneous comprehensible utterances were rated for grammaticality and ambiguity of function, and mothers' responses were noted. (Contains 14 references.) (Author)

Words artificially isolated from 12 parents' speech to their children aged 1;10-3;0 were significantly less intelligible to adult listeners than words originally spoken to an adult. While parents did not adjust the clarity of words, their speech was more redundant in anticipation of the children's comprehension. Research implications are…

Describes and examines three tests using an infant speech identification (ISI) procedure, in which English language environment infants, two- and six-year-old children, and adults were tested for their identification of sounds on a native (voice/voiceless bilabial stop) and a nonnative (prevoiced/voiced bilabial stop) speech continuum. (31…

We investigated infant precursors of low language scores in early childhood. The sample included 373 probands in 130 monozygotic (MZ) and 109 same-sex dizygotic (DZ) twin pairs in which at least one member of the pair scored in the lowest 15th percentile of a control sample on a general language factor derived from tester-administered tests at…