Purpose: The purpose of this study is to characterize the local (utterance-level) temporal regularities of child-directed speech (CDS) that might facilitate phonological development in Spanish, classically termed a syllable-timed language. Method: Eighteen female adults addressed their 4-year-old children versus other adults spontaneously and also…

The main goal of this tutorial is to promote the study of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different languages of the world. The cumulative effect of these efforts is likely to be a set of more compelling and comprehensive theories of language learning difficulties and, possibly, of language acquisition in general.…

Background: Prosodic reading is one of the steps needed to achieve reading fluency. It is already known that English children develop their reading prosody from the earliest grades of primary school, showing the greatest improvement between first and second grade, but there are no Spanish studies of the development of reading prosody in the first…

It has long been known that children may use a particular grammatical morpheme inconsistently at early stages of acquisition. Although this has often been thought to be evidence of incomplete syntactic representations, there is now a large body of crosslinguistic evidence showing that much of this early within-speaker variability is due to still…

Studies on the acquisition of Spanish as a first language do not agree on the patterns and factors relevant for coda development. In order to shed light on the questions involved, a longitudinal study of coda development in Northern European Spanish was carried out to explore the relationship between accuracy, markedness and frequency. The study…

It is well known that mental state verbs are difficult to acquire, but little is known about the acquisition of mental state language encoded through intonation. Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS) has at least three intonation contours available for marking polar questions (PQs): ¡H*L% marks an utterance as a PQ; H+L*L%, in addition to doing the former,…

This study investigates 3- to 5-year-old children's sensitivity to lexical, intonational and gestural information in the comprehension of speaker uncertainty. Most previous studies on children's understanding of speaker certainty and uncertainty across languages have focused on the comprehension of lexical markers, and little is known about the…

It has been proposed that cochlear implant users may develop robust categorical perception skills, but that they show limited precision in perception. This article explores if a parallel contrast is observable in production, and if, despite acquiring typical linguistic representations, their early words are inconsistent. The participants were…

Duration-based auditory grouping preferences are presumably shaped by language experience in adults and infants, unlike intensity-based grouping that is governed by a universal bias of a loud-soft preference. It has been proposed that duration-based rhythmic grouping preferences develop as a function of native language phrasal prosody.…

This dissertation investigates the relation between prosodic events at the phrasal level and component events at the rhythmic level. The overarching hypothesis is that the interaction among component rhythmic events gives rise to prosodic patterns at the phrasal level, while at the same time being constrained by the latter, and that in the case of…

During the first year of life, infants begin to have difficulties perceiving non-native vowel and consonant contrasts, thus adapting their perception to the phonetic categories of the target language. In this paper, we examine the perception of a non-segmental feature, i.e. stress. Previous research with adults has shown that speakers of French (a…

Recent studies of heritage speakers, many of whom possess incomplete knowledge of their family language, suggest that these speakers may be linguistically superior to second language (L2) learners only in phonology but not in morphosyntax. This study reexamines this claim by focusing on knowledge of clitic pronouns and word order in 24 L2 learners…

The structure of /s/-clusters has been a rather controversial subject due to their structural oddities. Studies on the acquisition of these clusters have contributed to the discussion to validate certain theoretical claims, and sonority-related issues have always been in focus. Cross-linguistic acquisition data from children with phonological…

This study investigated the development of English two-member onset #sC clusters in Spanish-English bilingual children with phonological disorders. Data from 30 children were analysed in terms of correct and incorrect productions, implicational relationships, and possible groupings according to the sonority index of the second member of the…

Phonological acquisition traditionally has been measured using constructs that focus on segments rather than the whole words. Findings from recent research have suggested whole-word productions be evaluated using measures such as phonological mean length of utterance (pMLU) and the proportion of whole-word proximity (PWP). These measures have been…