Research on "parentese," the acoustically exaggerated, slower, and higher-pitched speech directed toward infants, has mostly focused on maternal contributions, although it has long been known that fathers also produce parentese. Given recent societal changes in family dynamics, it is necessary to revise these mother-centered models of…

The present study analyses 3- to 6-year-old children's dialect-standard repertoires in an Austrian-Bavarian sociolinguistic setting and investigates how far individual repertoires can be explained by input and sociodemographic factors. Adults' linguistic repertoires in the area typically comprise a certain spectrum on the dialect-standard…

Research in language development has only recently begun to focus on the inherent variability of language. Previous studies have explored at what age children begin to produce variable linguistic forms and how these forms progress through development. While children produce adult-like variation early on, some variable forms take longer to acquire…

Researchers disagree as to the importance for infant language learning of isolated words, which occur relatively rarely in input speech. Brent and Siskind (2001) showed that the first words infants "produce" are words their mothers used most frequently in isolation. Here we investigate the long-term effects of presentation mode on…

Bilingual children are often exposed to non-native speech through their parents. Yet, little is known about the relation between bilingual preschoolers' speech production and their speech input. The present study investigated the production of voice onset time (VOT) by Dutch-German bilingual preschoolers and their sequential bilingual mothers. The…

The Mandarin resultative verb compound (RVC; e.g., "tui dao" "push fall" and "pa shang" "climb ascend") encodes complex events composed of an initiating action and resulting activity or state. This study investigated when Mandarin-speaking children acquired this language-specific device. Specifically, we…

Languages differ in how they encode causal events, placing greater or lesser emphasis on the agent or patient of the action. Little is known about how these preferences emerge and the relative influence of cognitive biases and language-specific input at different stages in development. In these studies, we investigated the emergence of sentence…

Adult learners know that language is for communicating and that there are patterns in the language that need to be learned. This affects the way they engage with language input; they search for form-meaning linkages, and this effortful engagement could interfere with their learning, especially for things like grammatical gender that often have at…