Phonology, Semantics, and the Comprehension-Expression Gap in Emerging Lexicons.

Purpose Children come to understand many words by the end of their 1st year of life, and yet, generally by 12 months, only a few words are said. In this study, we investigated which linguistic factors contribute to this comprehension-expression gap the most. Specifically, we asked the following: Are phonological neighborhood density, semantic neighborhood density, and word frequency (WF) significant predictors of the probability that words known (understood) by children would appear in their spoken lexicons? Method Monosyllabic words in the active (understood and said) and passive (understood, not said) lexicons of 201 toddlers were extracted from the Dutch Communicative Development Inventory (Zink & Lejaegere, 2002) parent-completed forms.

Gleaning Structure from Sound: The Role of Prosodic Contrast in Learning Non-adjacent Dependencies.

The ability to detect non-adjacent dependencies (i.e. between a and b in aXb) in spoken input may support the acquisition of morpho-syntactic dependencies (e.

Non-adjacent dependency learning in infants at familial risk of dyslexia.

This study tests the hypothesis that developmental dyslexia is (partly) caused by a deficit in implicit sequential learning, by investigating whether infants at familial risk of dyslexia can track non-adjacent dependencies in an artificial language. An implicit learning deficit would hinder detection of such dependencies, which mark grammatical relations (e.g.