To explore early lexical development, the authors examined infants' sensitivity to changes in spoken syllables and objects given different temporal relations between syllable-object pairings. In Experiment 1, they habituated 2-month-olds to 1 syllable, /tah/ or /gah/, paired with an object in "synchronous" (utterances coincident with object…

Infant phonetic perception reorganizes in accordance with the native language by 10 months of age. One mechanism that may underlie this perceptual change is distributional learning, a statistical analysis of the distributional frequency of speech sounds. Previous distributional learning studies have tested infants of 6-8 months, an age at which…

This new text consists of parts of Bornstein and Lamb's Developmental Science, 6th edition along with new introductory material that as a whole provides a cutting edge and comprehensive overview of cognitive development. Each of the world-renowned contributors masterfully introduces the history and systems, methodologies, and measurement and…

Purpose: To examine patterns of sensory responsiveness (i.e., hyperresponsiveness, hyporesponsiveness, and sensory seeking) as factors that may account for variability in social-communicative symptoms of autism and variability in language, social, and communication skill development in children with autism or other developmental disabilities…

The shared features that characterize the noun categories that young children learn first are a formative basis of the human category system. To investigate the potential categorical information contained in the features of early-learned nouns, we examine the graph-theoretic properties of noun-feature networks. The networks are built from the…

In this paper we consider the perceptual and conceptual contributions that shape early word learning, using research on the "shape bias" as a case in point. In our view, conceptual, linguistic, social-pragmatic, and perceptual sources of information influence one another powerfully and continuously in the service of word learning throughout…

Development and behavior during the first 2 years of life was assessed retrospectively by the parents to 23 adolescents and young adults with Asperger syndrome and 13 typically developing adolescents and young adults. The groups were matched on chronological age and the participants were within the normal range of intelligence. The questionnaire,…

To test whether six-month-old infants recognize the auditory similarity of speech sounds sharing a value on a phonetic-feature dimension, an operant head turn procedure was used. Results indicated that the performance of infants trained on phonetically related speech sounds was far superior to that of infants in the nonphonetic control group.…

The development of native language phonetic representations in bilingual infants was compared to that of monolingual infants. Infants (ages 6-8, 10-12, and 14-20 months) from English-French or English-only environments were tested on their ability to discriminate a French and an English voice onset time distinction. Although 6- to 8-month-olds…

Most international adoptees (IA) have rapid catch-up of the delays common at arrival. However, it is not known whether development at arrival predicts later abilities or school readiness. Therefore, we comprehensively evaluated language, fine motor, visual reception (VR), executive function (EF), attention (ATT), and sensory skills (SS) in IA…

One-hundred eighteen children (five-seven years old) were tested fall and spring on language comprehension logico-perceptual development, and reading acquisition. It was concluded that strategies demonstrated in the logico-perceptual tasks may play a fundamental role in correct interpretation of certain language structures. (Author/CL)

Describes a study of children's production of locative prepositions in order to test H. Clark's hypotheses regarding the acquisition of spatial terms. Subjects were required to describe the spatial arrangement of two balls arranged in each of three spatial dimensions. (SED)

Reviews pertinent developmental and neuropsychological literature and arrives at a hypothesis relating the left brain lateralization of speech to the origin of early naming as part of selective (right-biased) orienting to perceived salience or change. (Author/SS)

Investigated whether and when children establish various semantic relations between old and new words. Fifty 2-year olds were taught labels for objects previously referred to by an overextended term. Findings are discussed in light of theories of lexical development, particularly with regard to conceptualizations of constraints on the acquisition…