Multi-accent environments offer rich but inconsistent language input, as words are produced differently across accents. The current study examined, in two experiments, whether multi-accent variability affects infants' ability to LEARN WORDS and whether toddlers' prior experience with accents modulates learning. In Experiment 1,…

We examined how noun frequency and the typicality of surrounding linguistic context contribute to children's real-time comprehension. Monolingual English-learning toddlers viewed pairs of pictures while hearing sentences with typical or atypical sentence frames ("Look at the…" vs. "Examine the…"), followed by nouns that were…

Turkish-speaking dyzygotic twins (n = 21) and singletons (n = 23) were tested through a standard articulation test to observe whether their consonant articulations were related to their vocabulary sizes, recorded through CDI forms, at age 3;0. Twins were observed to lag behind their singleton peers and performed below the norm level in their…

Many children grow up hearing multiple languages, learning words in each. How does the number of languages being learned affect multilinguals' vocabulary development? In a pre-registered study, we compared productive vocabularies of bilingual (n = 170) and trilingual (n = 20) toddlers aged 17-33 months growing up in a bilingual community where…

This article presents data on lexical development of 881 Israeli Hebrew-speaking monolingual toddlers ages 1;0 to 2;0. A Web-based version of the Hebrew MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (H-MB-CDI) was used for data collection. Growth curves for expressive vocabulary, receptive vocabulary, actions and gestures were…

Is noun dominance in early lexical acquisition a widespread or a language-specific phenomenon? Thirty Singaporean bilingual English-Mandarin learning toddlers and their mothers were observed in a mother-child play interaction. For both English and Mandarin, toddlers' speech and reported vocabulary contained more nouns than verbs across book…

The role of children's verbal repetition of parents' utterances on vocabulary growth has been well documented (Masur, 1999). Nevertheless, few studies have analyzed adults' and children's spontaneous verbal repetition around the second birthday distinguishing between the types of repetition. We analyzed longitudinally Spanish-speaking parent-child…

Aims: Although IDS is typically described as slower than adult-directed speech (ADS), potential impacts of slower speech on language development have not been examined. We explored whether IDS speech rates in 42 mother-infant dyads at four time periods predicted children's language outcomes at two years. Method: We correlated IDS speech rate with…

We examined the size, content, and use of evaluative lexis by 26 English monolingual and 20 Spanish-English bilingual 30-month-old children in interaction with their mothers. We extracted the evaluative words, defined as words referring to cognition, volition, or emotion. Controlling for overall vocabulary skills as measured by the MacArthur-Bates…

The looking-while-listening (LWL) paradigm is frequently used to measure toddlers' lexical processing efficiency (LPE). Children's LPE is associated with vocabulary size, yet other linguistic, cognitive, or social skills contributing to LPE are not well understood. It also remains unclear whether LPE measures from two types of LWL trials…

Infants begin to understand some of the meanings of the adjective "good" at around thirteen months, but it is not clear when they start to map it to concepts in the moral domain. We investigated infants' and toddlers' knowledge of "good" in the domains of help and fairness. Participants at 20 and 30 months were shown computer…

The contribution of parent input to children's subsequent expressive verb diversity was explored in twenty typically developing toddlers with small verb lexicons. Child developmental factors and parent input measures (i.e. verb quantity, verb diversity, and verb-related structural cues) at age 1;9 were examined as potential predictors of…

This study investigated how Korean toddlers' perception of stop categories develops in the acoustic dimensions of VOT and F0. To examine the developmental trajectory of VOT and F0 in toddlers' perceptual space, a perceptual identification test with natural and synthesized sound stimuli was conducted with 58 Korean monolingual children (aged 2-4…

We examined the relation between maternal responsiveness and children's acquisition of mental and non-mental state vocabulary in 59 pairs of mothers and children aged 10 to 26 months as they engaged in a free-play episode. Children wore a head camera and responsiveness was defined as maternal talk that commented on the child's actions (e.g., when…

This paper examines the acquisition of demonstratives (e.g., "that," "there") from a cross-linguistic perspective. Although demonstratives are often said to play a crucial role in L1 acquisition, there is little systematic research on this topic. Using extensive corpus data of spontaneous child speech, the paper investigates…