Infants begin to segment words from fluent speech during the same time period that they learn phonetic categories. Segmented words can provide a potentially useful cue for phonetic learning, yet accounts of phonetic category acquisition typically ignore the contexts in which sounds appear. We present two experiments to show that, contrary to the…

Does spatial language influence how people think about space? To address this question, we observed children who did not know a conventional language, and tested their performance on nonlinguistic spatial tasks. We studied deaf children living in Istanbul whose hearing losses prevented them from acquiring speech and whose hearing parents had not…

Determining the referent of a novel name is a critical task for young language learners. The majority of studies on children's referent selection focus on manipulating the sources of information (linguistic, contextual and pragmatic) that children can use to solve the referent mapping problem. Here, we take a step back and explore how children's…

The recognition of familiar words was evaluated in 20-month-old children raised in a rhotic accent environment to parents that had either rhotic or non-rhotic accents. Using an Intermodal Preferential Looking task children were presented with familiar objects (e.g. "bird") named in their rhotic or non-rhotic form. Children were only able to…

The relation between event apprehension and utterance formulation was examined in children and adults. English-speaking adults and 4-year-olds viewed motion events while their eye movements were monitored. Half of the participants in each age group described each event (Linguistic task), whereas the other half studied the events for an upcoming…

When toddlers view an event while hearing a novel verb, the verb's syntactic context has been shown to help them identify its meaning. The current work takes this finding one step further to reveal that even in the absence of an accompanying event, syntactic information supports toddlers' identification of verb meaning. Two-year-olds were first…

Age of acquisition (AoA) effects have been used to support the notion of a critical period for first language acquisition. In this study, we examine AoA effects in deaf British Sign Language (BSL) users via a grammaticality judgment task. When English reading performance and nonverbal IQ are factored out, results show that accuracy of…

Learning a second language as an adult is particularly effortful when new phonetic representations must be formed. Therefore the processes that allow learning of speech sounds are of great theoretical and practical interest. Here we examined whether perception of single formant transitions, that is, sound components critical in speech perception,…

When faced with a sentence like, "Some of the toys are on the table", adults, but not preschoolers, compute a scalar implicature, taking the sentence to imply that not all the toys are on the table. This paper explores the hypothesis that children fail to compute scalar implicatures because they lack knowledge of relevant scalar alternatives to…

In a crossmodal priming experiment, visual targets (e.g. "RENARD," "fox") were auditorily primed by either an intact [l[schwa][R][schwa]na[R]] "the fox" or reduced form [l[schwa][R]na[R]] "the fox" of the word. When schwa deletion gave rise to an initial cluster that respected the phonotactic constraints of French (e.g. [lapluz] "the lawn" in…

The Stroop paradigm was used to examine the role of phonological activation in semantic access and its development in reading Chinese characters. Subjects (age 7-23 years) of different reading ability were asked to name the display color of Chinese characters. The characters were displayed in four different colors: red, yellow, blue and green.…