The current study investigated whether vocabulary relates to phonetic categorization at neural level in early childhood. Electroencephalogram (EEG) responses were collected from 53 Dutch 20-month-old children in a passive oddball paradigm, in which they were presented with two nonwords "giep" [[voiced velar fricative]ip] and…

Prosody is the fundamental organizing principle of spoken language, carrying lexical, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic information. It, therefore, provides highly relevant input for language development. Are infants sensitive to this important aspect of spoken language early on? In this study, we asked whether infants are able to discriminate…

To learn a language infants must learn to link arbitrary sounds to their meaning. While words are the clearest example of this link, they are not the only component of language; morphological regularities (e.g., the plural -s suffix in English) carry meaning as well. Comprehensive theories of language acquisition must account for how infants build…

Here we report, for the first time, a relationship between sensitivity to amplitude envelope rise time in infants and their later vocabulary development. Recent research in auditory neuroscience has revealed that amplitude envelope rise time plays a mechanistic role in speech encoding. Accordingly, individual differences in infant discrimination…

Distributional information is a potential cue for learning syntactic categories. Recent studies demonstrate a developmental trajectory in the level of abstraction of distributional learning in young infants. Here we investigate the effect of prosody on infants' learning of adjacent relations between words. Twelve- to thirteen-month-old infants…

The paper reviews research on the choice discrimination program, a method of teaching receptive language to severely handicapped children. The writer's own work using this method is compared to previous research, and he suggests that the approach may be useful with other groups. (CL)

Immediate discriminative control by spoken words was examined in a profoundly retarded, mute young man. Procedures suggested a potentially errorless, efficient teaching method for individuals without fundamental language. (Author/SB)

Thirty 4- and 5-year-olds with specific language impairment (SLI) and 30 normally developing peers participated in a discrimination learning-shift paradigm. Both groups were equally successful in extracting regularities from recurring nonverbal stimuli and in making shifts. Findings failed to provide evidence that children with SLI are less able…

When asked to identify "chairs" from a series of pictures and order them as best examples, adults used contextual clues about the objects' function in their judgments. However, contextual function clues caused children's judgment to change greatly. Results are discussed in relation to theories of concept formation in children. (MSE)

Six experiments examined infants' ability to associate nonsense words with two causal actions: pushing and pulling. Eighteen-month-olds, but not 14-month-olds, formed word-action associations. Fourteen-month-olds discriminated a change in label but not a change in action when the other was held constant. When language labels were replaced with…

The present study affords an explanation for the consistent, but not always statistically significant, pattern showing superior verbal discrimination learning performance for low- as compared to high-frequency words. In a frequency judgment task it was found that relative to high-frequency words, low-frequency words for which subjects (sixth…

This study, which assessed hypothesis-testing abilities using a discrimination-learning paradigm, found that 16 language-impaired primary-level children solved fewer problems than 16 controls equated on cognitive level, but the 2 groups used similar hypothesis types to solve the problems. Type of verbal feedback (explicit versus nonexplicit) did…

Recent literature on the acquisition of "more" and "less" is reviewed with special emphasis on some key issues. The overriding goal of studies in this area has been the discovery of the developmental sequence that the child follows in acquiring "more" and "less," and, more generally, all comparative structures. The earliest empirical studies on…

This study incorporated a correlational methodology into an experimental context to determine the functional components of rehearsal strategies in children's discrimination learning. The subjects for this study were 120 fifth- and sixth-grade children attending two elementary schools located in middle-class areas of Ogden, Utah. According to the…

Two experiments with a total of 17 adolescents or adults with severe mental retardation evaluated the potential of exclusion procedures (selection of an undefined object in comparison with a defined object) as a means of training basic naming skills. Reliable exclusion and naming performance were demonstrated in nearly all subjects. (DB)