This study investigated verbal imitation from a multimodal point of view, considering the mutual influence of children's and adults' participation. Sixteen Spanish-speaking children were observed longitudinally at 21, 24, and 30 months of age in natural settings. We analyzed the multimodal characteristics of children's and adults' repetitions,…

Research on the acoustic characteristics of Infant Directed Speech (IDS) in North American English indicates that it is generally higher-pitched than Adult Directed Speech (ADS) and has unique prosodic characteristics, which is commonly found across many spoken languages. However, very little research has addressed another important aspect of…

Young children's (n = 108) and adults' (n = 40) ability to compute ad-hoc quantity conversational implicatures was assessed using a new implicit task that relied on eye-tracking. The children were 2 and 5 years old. Looking times reveal that all participants interpreted simple references by relying on implicatures. However, 2-year-olds failed to…

There is a long-standing debate in the literature about the benefits that acoustic components of Infant Directed Speech (IDS) might have for infants' language acquisition. One of the highly contested features is vowel space expansion, which refers to the enlargement of the acoustic space between the corner vowels /i, u, a/ in IDS compared to Adult…

The lack of diversity in the language sciences has increasingly been criticized as it holds the potential for producing flawed theories. Research on (i) geographically diverse language communities and (ii) on sign languages is necessary to corroborate, sharpen, and extend existing theories. This study contributes a case study of adapting a…

Maternal scaffolding and four-year-old children's linguistic skills were examined during toy play. Participants were 21 American-English monolingual and 21 Thai monolingual mother-child dyads. Results revealed cross-cultural differences in conversation styles between the two groups. American dyads adopted a high-elaborative style relative to Thai…

Human languages, signed and spoken, can be characterized by the structural patterns they use to associate communicative "forms" with "meanings." One such pattern is paradigmatic morphology, where complex words are built from the systematic use "and re-use" of sub-lexical units. Here, we provide evidence of emergent…

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is characterized by a range of register-typical characteristics. Many of those can be objectively measured, such as acoustic-prosodic and structural-linguistic modifications. Perceived vocal affect, however, is a socio-emotional IDS characteristic and is subjectively assessed. Vocal affect goes beyond acoustic-prosodic…

In successful communication, it is critical to have the ability to identify what a speaker is referring to from previously mentioned information. This ability requires the identification of the topic initially introduced by lexical forms and its continuity in discourse expressed by anaphora such as null and pronominal forms in the subsequent…

Although both fathers and mothers speak differently in infant-directed speech (IDS) compared to adult-directed speech (ADS), the acoustic characteristics of present-day paternal IDS are still insufficiently understood. To extend this understanding, 11 fathers and 17 mothers in The Netherlands were recorded interacting with their infant…

Background noise challenges auditory recognition of speech and may reveal the underlying deficits in auditory word recognition skills. Previous studies have reported an association between children's auditory skills and various linguistic skills, including phonology, although in some languages only. However, language-specific features influence…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex pathology that includes impaired social interaction abilities. Insufficient attention has been paid to programs specifically devoted to improving communicative-pragmatic skills. Moreover, the majority of studies have focused on children, while programs specifically developed for the adolescents are…

Visually situated spoken words activate phonological, visual, and semantic representations guiding overt attention during visual exploration. We compared the activation of these representations in children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) across four eye-tracking experiments, with a particular focus on visual (shape)…

Over time, people who spend a lot of time together (e.g., roommates) begin sounding alike. Even over the course of short conversations, interlocutors often become more acoustically similar to one another. This phenomenon -- known as phonetic alignment -- has been well studied in adult interactions, but much less is known about alignment patterns…

Foreign accents can vary considerably in the degree to which they deviate from the listener's native accent, but little is known about how the relationship between a speaker's accent and a listener's native language phonology mediates adaptation. Using an artificial accent methodology, we addressed this issue by constructing a set of three…