In everyday life, children hear but also often see their caregiver talking. Children build on this correspondence to resolve auditory uncertainties and decipher words from the speech input. As they hear the name of an object, 18- to 30-month-olds form a representation that permits word recognition in either the auditory (i.e. acoustic form of the…

An analysis of French oral proficiency and guidelines for evaluating and testing the development of such proficiency in learning French as a second language are the keynotes of this dissertation. The speech patterns (structural complexity, rate of production, and hesitation) of three groups of French students with various levels of audiolingual…