Purpose: The Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) technology uses automated speech processing (ASP) algorithms to estimate counts such as total adult words and child vocalizations, which helps understand children's early language environment. This ASP has been validated in North American English and other languages in predominantly monolingual…

Young children's (n = 108) and adults' (n = 40) ability to compute ad-hoc quantity conversational implicatures was assessed using a new implicit task that relied on eye-tracking. The children were 2 and 5 years old. Looking times reveal that all participants interpreted simple references by relying on implicatures. However, 2-year-olds failed to…

Research on the multisensory control of locomotion has demonstrated that adults exhibit auditory-motor entrainment across an array of contexts. In such work adults will consciously modulate the cadence of their walking when instructed to match their footfalls to an auditory metronome equal to, slower than, or faster than, their natural walking…

Children's speech is influenced by the speech they hear, in particular by the parental speech addressed directly to them. The aim of this study was to analyse toddlers' speech with their parents and to investigate the influence of specific characteristics of child-directed speech on child speech in real time during mother-child and father-child…

Korean is a classifier language in which bare nouns are not obligatorily number-marked. Children learning other classifier languages like Japanese and Mandarin are late in learning the plural morpheme. In this paper, we present two datasets that suggest that Korean plural marker "-tul" is acquired much earlier, in contrast to what has…

Purpose: This study compares the home language environments of children with (a suspicion of) developmental language disorder (DLD) with that of children with typical development (TD). It does so by adopting new technology that automatically provides metrics about children's language environment (Language ENvironment Analysis [LENA]). In addition,…

The study used naturalistic data on the production of nominal prefixes in the Otopamean language Northern Pame (autonym: Xi'iuy) to test Whole Word (constructivist) and Minimal Word (prosodic) theories for the acquisition of inflection. Whole Word theories assume that children store words in their entirety; Minimal Word theories assume that…

This study investigated verbal imitation from a multimodal point of view, considering the mutual influence of children's and adults' participation. Sixteen Spanish-speaking children were observed longitudinally at 21, 24, and 30 months of age in natural settings. We analyzed the multimodal characteristics of children's and adults' repetitions,…

Upon hearing a novel label, listeners tend to assume that it refers to a novel, rather than a familiar object. While this disambiguation or mutual exclusivity (ME) effect has been robustly shown across development, it is unclear what it involves. Do listeners use their pragmatic and lexical knowledge to exclude the familiar object and thus select…

Cross-sectional studies have shown that greater friendship satisfaction in adulthood is associated with many positive outcomes (Chopik, 2017; Gillespie, Frederick, et al., 2015). However, the developmental antecedents of satisfaction with close friends in adulthood have not been examined using prospective data. We do not know, for example, whether…

Purpose: This study examined toddlers' processing of mispronunciations based on their frequency of occurrence in child speech and the speaker who produced them. Method: One hundred twenty 22-month-olds were assigned to 1 of 4 conditions. Using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm, toddlers were shown visual displays containing 1 familiar…

The quantitative assessment of eye tracking data quality is critical for ensuring accuracy and precision of gaze position measurements. However, researchers often report the eye tracker's optimal manufacturer's specifications rather than empirical data about the accuracy and precision of the eye tracking data being presented. Indeed, a recent…

Our motivation was to examine how toddler (2;6) and adult speakers of American English prosodically realize information status categories. The aims were three-fold: (1) to analyze how adults phonologically make information status distinctions; (2) to examine how these same categories are signaled in toddlers' spontaneous speech; and (3) to analyze…

Despite the seemingly simple mapping between adjectives and perceptual properties (e.g., color, texture), preschool children have difficulty establishing the appropriate extension of novel adjectives. When children hear a novel adjective applied to an individual object, they successfully extend the adjective to other members of the same object…

Foreign accents can vary considerably in the degree to which they deviate from the listener's native accent, but little is known about how the relationship between a speaker's accent and a listener's native language phonology mediates adaptation. Using an artificial accent methodology, we addressed this issue by constructing a set of three…