Recent evidence from adult pronoun comprehension suggests that semantic factors such as verb transitivity affect referent salience and thereby anaphora resolution. We tested whether the same semantic factors influence pronoun comprehension in young children. In a visual world study, 3-year-olds heard stories that began with a sentence containing…

Research presented in this paper on the character of infant-directed speech and the nature of infant speech perception abilities from 6 to 12 months suggests that prosody contributes significantly to early analyses of child languages and assists infants in developing root processes of parsing. (104 references) (Author/CK)