Prosodic cues enhance infants' sensitivity to nonadjacent regularities.

In language, grammatical dependencies often hold between items that are not immediately adjacent to each other. Acquiring these nonadjacent dependencies is crucial for learning grammar. However, there are potentially infinitely many dependencies in the language input.

Newborns discriminate utterance-level prosodic contours.

Prosody is the fundamental organizing principle of spoken language, carrying lexical, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic information. It, therefore, provides highly relevant input for language development. Are infants sensitive to this important aspect of spoken language early on? In this study, we asked whether infants are able to discriminate well-formed utterance-level prosodic contours from ill-formed, backward prosodic contours at birth.

Violation of non-adjacent rule dependencies elicits greater attention to a talker's mouth in 15-month-old infants.

Infants start tracking auditory-only non-adjacent dependencies (NAD) between 15 and 18 months of age. Given that audiovisual speech, normally available in a talker's mouth, is perceptually more salient than auditory speech and that it facilitates speech processing and language acquisition, we investigated whether 15-month-old infants' NAD learning is modulated by attention to a talker's mouth. Infants performed an audiovisual NAD learning task while we recorded their selective attention to the eyes, mouth, and face of an actress while she spoke an artificial language that followed an AXB structure (tis-X-bun; nal-X-gor) during familiarization.

Rethinking attention in time: Expectancy violations reconcile contradictory developmental evidence.

Temporal expectations critically influence perception and action. Previous research reports contradictory results in children's ability to endogenously orient attention in time as well as the developmental course. To reconcile this seemingly conflicting evidence, we put forward the hypothesis that expectancy violations-through the use of invalid trials-are the source of the mixed evidence reported in the literature.

Integrating when and what information in the left parietal lobe allows language rule generalization.

A crucial aspect when learning a language is discovering the rules that govern how words are combined in order to convey meanings. Because rules are characterized by sequential co-occurrences between elements (e.g.

Correction: Endogenous temporal attention in the absence of stimulus-driven cues emerges in the second year of life.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

Endogenous temporal attention in the absence of stimulus-driven cues emerges in the second year of life.

Anticipating both where and when an object will appear is a critical ability for adaptation. Research in the temporal domain in adults indicate that dissociable mechanisms relate to endogenous attention driven by the properties of the stimulus themselves (e.g.

Temporal Attention as a Scaffold for Language Development.

Language is one of the most fascinating abilities that humans possess. Infants demonstrate an amazing repertoire of linguistic abilities from very early on and reach an adult-like form incredibly fast. However, language is not acquired all at once but in an incremental fashion.