The current study investigated whether vocabulary relates to phonetic categorization at neural level in early childhood. Electroencephalogram (EEG) responses were collected from 53 Dutch 20-month-old children in a passive oddball paradigm, in which they were presented with two nonwords "giep" [[voiced velar fricative]ip] and…

To learn a language infants must learn to link arbitrary sounds to their meaning. While words are the clearest example of this link, they are not the only component of language; morphological regularities (e.g., the plural -s suffix in English) carry meaning as well. Comprehensive theories of language acquisition must account for how infants build…

Here we report, for the first time, a relationship between sensitivity to amplitude envelope rise time in infants and their later vocabulary development. Recent research in auditory neuroscience has revealed that amplitude envelope rise time plays a mechanistic role in speech encoding. Accordingly, individual differences in infant discrimination…

Distributional information is a potential cue for learning syntactic categories. Recent studies demonstrate a developmental trajectory in the level of abstraction of distributional learning in young infants. Here we investigate the effect of prosody on infants' learning of adjacent relations between words. Twelve- to thirteen-month-old infants…

Sixteen 9-18 month normal/superior infants "played" in their home cribs with a two-channel operant "toy" which allowed free choice between alternate audio feedbacks. With more than 300,000 seconds of listening time in the response record, 12 babies successfully discriminated gross differences in auditory complexity, while 10 discriminated fine…

Six experiments examined infants' ability to associate nonsense words with two causal actions: pushing and pulling. Eighteen-month-olds, but not 14-month-olds, formed word-action associations. Fourteen-month-olds discriminated a change in label but not a change in action when the other was held constant. When language labels were replaced with…

Infants 5-17 weeks of age were presented with foreign sounds which were contingent upon their nonnutritive sucking. Significant differences were found for experimental versus control (no sound change) subjects. It was found that adults achieved perfect accuracy with English contrasts but readily confused the foreign contrasts. (Author/SB)

In Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior, three categories of environmental control over instances of verbal behavior appear to be relevant to the study of infant vocal development: the mand, the tact, and the echoic categories. Procedures used in the remediation of language deficiencies and procedures found in work in the area of language…

This book is a compilation of literature and research concerning how children learn. The first chapter is a historical introduction to research in learning that summarizes the major developments of the last 100 years and relates these developments specifically to children's learning. The main body of the text is divided into six major topics: (1)…

A study is undertaken to determine whether the nonlinguistic priority of the agent of an action facilitates the comprehension of word reference. The subjects were twelve male and twelve female infants at the one word stage of language production. The children were presented with three nonsense names (presented as part of a narration of a filmed…

This is a partial report of a longitudinal investigation designed to assess the psychological effects of an experimentally conducted day care program on children during the first 30 months of life. The experimental subjects were Chinese and Caucasian children from working and middle class families who were cared for at a special group care center…

This monograph is a collection of papers describing a series of loosely related studies of visual attention, auditory stimulation, and language discrimination in young infants. Titles include: (1) Infant Attention and Discrimination: Methodological and Substantive Issues; (2) The Addition of Auditory Stimulation (Music) and an Interspersed…

This volume includes reports of five research projects of the Kansas Center for Research in Early Childhood Education: (1) Individual Differences in Newborn and Young Infants, including research with the Brazelton Neonatal Assessment Scale and laboratory studies of infant discriminative abilities; (2) Development of Social Competence, including…