This research investigates selectivity in word learning for bilingual infants. Previous work demonstrated that bilingual infants show greater openness to non-native language sounds in object labels than monolinguals (Hay et al., 2015; Singh, 2018). It remains unclear whether bilingual openness extends to nonspeech sounds. We presented 14- and…

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is a specific register that adults use to address infants, and it is characterised by prosodic exaggeration and lexical and syntactic simplification. Several authors have underlined that this simplified speech becomes more complex according to the infant's age. However, there is a lack of studies on lexical and…

This study investigates the pitch properties of infant-directed speech (IDS) specific to word-learning contexts in which mothers introduce unfamiliar words to children. Using a semi-spontaneous story-book telling task, we examined (1) whether mothers made distinctions between unfamiliar and familiar words with pitch in IDS compared to…

This study investigated the integration of word- and phrase-level prominences in speech produced by twenty-five school-aged children (6;2 to 7;3) and twenty-five adults. Participants produced disyllabic number words in a straight count condition and in two phrasal conditions, namely, a stress clash and non-clash phrasal context. Duration and…

Studies analyzing children's response time to detect word targets revealed that six-year-olds and younger children generally did not show the response time advantage for accented target words which adult listeners show, providing support for the argument that the processing advantage for accented words reflects the semantic role of accent as an…

Research undertaken to date suggests that important developments in the understanding and use of intonation may take place after the age of 5;0. The present study aims to provide a more comprehensive account of these developments. A specially designed battery of prosodic tasks was administered to four groups of thirty children, from London (U.K.),…