Many children grow up hearing multiple languages, learning words in each. How does the number of languages being learned affect multilinguals' vocabulary development? In a pre-registered study, we compared productive vocabularies of bilingual (n = 170) and trilingual (n = 20) toddlers aged 17-33 months growing up in a bilingual community where…

This study examines the content and function of parent-child talk while engaging in shared storybook reading with two narrative books: a wordless book versus a book with text. Thirty-six parents audio-recorded themselves reading one of the books at home with their 3.5-5.5-year-old children. Pragmatic and linguistic measures of parental and child…

Within developmental psychology, pointing gestures have received a great deal of attention, while ostensive gestures have been overlooked in terms of their emergence and intentionality. In a longitudinal and micro-genetic study with six children at 9, 11, and 13 months of age, we codified gesture production of children within second-by-second data…

Previous research has documented that children count spatiotemporally-distinct partial objects as if they were whole objects. This behavior extends beyond counting to inclusion of partial objects in assessment and comparisons of quantities. Multiple accounts of this performance have been proposed: children and adults differ qualitatively in their…

This study examined the characteristics of the vocal behaviors of parents and preterm infants, as compared to their term-born peers, at three months of age. Potential links between specific features of parental IDS and infants' vocal activity were also sought. We analyzed the frequencies and durations of vocalizations and pauses during the dyadic…

We investigated how Central Swedish-speaking four to eleven-year-old children acquire the prosodic marking of narrow focus, compared to adult controls. Three measurements were analysed: placement of the prominence-marking high tone (prominence H), pitch range effects of the prominence H, and word duration. Subject-verb-object sentences were…

Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have smaller vocabularies in infancy compared to typically-developing children. To understand whether their smaller vocabularies stem from problems in learning, our study compared a prospective risk sample of 18 elevated risk and 11 lower risk 24-month-olds on current vocabulary size and…

Learning to use word versus phrase level prosody to identify compounds from lists is thought to be a protracted process, only acquired by 11 years (Vogel & Raimy, 2002). However, a recent study has shown that 5-year-olds can use prosodic cues other than stress for these two structures in production, at least for early-acquired noun-noun…

Parents are often a good source of information, introducing children to how the world around them is described and explained in terms of cause-and-effect relations. Parents also vary in their speech, and these variations can predict children's later language skills. Being born preterm might be related to such parent-child interactions. The present…

The generalisation of linguistic constructions is performed through analogical reasoning. Children with developmental language disorders (DLD) are impaired in analogical reasoning and in generalisation. However, these processes are improved by an input involving variability and similarity. Here we investigated the performance of children with or…

Anticipatory coarticulation is an indispensable feature of speech dynamics contributing to spoken language fluency. Research has shown that children speak with greater degrees of vowel anticipatory coarticulation than adults -- that is, greater vocalic influence on previous segments. The present study examined how developmental differences in…

Several studies investigated preschoolers' ability to compute scalar and ad-hoc implicatures, but only one compared children's performance with both kinds of implicature with the same task, a picture selection task. In Experiment 1 (N = 58, age: 4;2-6;0), we first show that the truth value judgment task, traditionally employed to investigate…

The purpose of the current study was to examine effects of bilingual language input on infant word segmentation and on talker generalization. In the present study, monolingually and bilingually exposed infants were compared on their abilities to recognize familiarized words in speech and to maintain generalizable representations of familiarized…

Much research has focused on the expression of voluntary motion (Slobin, 2004; Talmy, 2000). The present study contributes to this body of research by comparing how children (three to ten years) and adults narrated short, animated cartoons in English and German (SATELLITE-FRAMED languages) vs. French (VERB-FRAMED). The cartoons showed agents…

The goal of this study was to determine if typically developing children could form grammatical categories from distributional information alone. Twenty-seven children aged six to nine listened to an artifcial grammar which contained strategic gaps in its distribution. At test, we compared how children rated novel sentences that ft the grammar to…