Who spoke that language? Assessing early face-language associations in monolingual and bilingual infants.

Introduction: In bilingual communities, knowing the language each speaker uses may support language separation and, later, guide language use in a context-appropriate manner. Previous research has shown that infants begin to form primary associations between the face and the language used by a speaker around the age of 3 months. However, there is still a limited understanding of how robust these associations are and whether they are influenced by the linguistic background of the infant.

Time course of attention to a talker's mouth in monolingual and close-language bilingual children.

We presented 28 Spanish monolingual and 28 Catalan-Spanish close-language bilingual 5-year-old children with a video of a talker speaking in the children's native language and a nonnative language and examined the temporal dynamics of their selective attention to the talker's eyes and mouth. When the talker spoke in the children's native language, monolinguals attended equally to the eyes and mouth throughout the trial, whereas close-language bilinguals first attended more to the mouth and then distributed attention equally between the eyes and mouth. In contrast, when the talker spoke in a nonnative language (English), both monolinguals and bilinguals initially attended more to the mouth and then gradually shifted to a pattern of equal attention to the eyes and mouth.

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.

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.

Twelve-month-old infants' attention to the eyes of a talking face is associated with communication and social skills.

We investigated whether attention to a talker's eyes in 12 month-old infants is related to their communication and social abilities. We measured infant attention to a talker's eyes and mouth with a Tobii eye-tracker and examined the correlation between attention to the talker's eyes and scores on the Adaptive Behavior Questionnaire from the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development (BSID-III). Results indicated a positive relationship between eye gaze and scores on the Social and Communication subscales of the BSID-III.

Inside bilingualism: Language background modulates selective attention to a talker's mouth.

Previous findings indicate that bilingual Catalan/Spanish-learning infants attend more to the highly salient audiovisual redundancy cues normally available in a talker's mouth than do monolingual infants. Presumably, greater attention to such cues renders the challenge of learning two languages easier. Spanish and Catalan are, however, rhythmically and phonologically close languages.

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.

Bilingualism modulates infants' selective attention to the mouth of a talking face.

Infants growing up in bilingual environments succeed at learning two languages. What adaptive processes enable them to master the more complex nature of bilingual input? One possibility is that bilingual infants take greater advantage of the redundancy of the audiovisual speech that they usually experience during social interactions. Thus, we investigated whether bilingual infants' need to keep languages apart increases their attention to the mouth as a source of redundant and reliable speech cues.

Nine-month-old infants are sensitive to the temporal alignment of prosodic and gesture prominences.

This study investigated the sensitivity of 9-month-old infants to the alignment between prosodic and gesture prominences in pointing-speech combinations. Results revealed that the perception of prominence is multimodal and that infants are aware of the timing of gesture-speech combinations well before they can produce them.

Recognition of Amodal Language Identity Emerges in Infancy.

Audiovisual speech consists of overlapping and invariant patterns of dynamic acoustic and optic articulatory information. Research has shown that infants can perceive a variety of basic audio-visual (A-V) relations but no studies have investigated whether and when infants begin to perceive higher order A-V relations inherent in speech. Here, we asked whether and when infants become capable of recognizing amodal language identity, a critical perceptual skill that is necessary for the development of multisensory communication.

Infant perception of audio-visual speech synchrony in familiar and unfamiliar fluent speech.

We investigated the effects of linguistic experience and language familiarity on the perception of audio-visual (A-V) synchrony in fluent speech. In Experiment 1, we tested a group of monolingual Spanish- and Catalan-learning 8-month-old infants to a video clip of a person speaking Spanish. Following habituation to the audiovisually synchronous video, infants saw and heard desynchronized clips of the same video where the audio stream now preceded the video stream by 366, 500, or 666 ms.

Perception of audio-visual speech synchrony in Spanish-speaking children with and without specific language impairment.

Speech perception involves the integration of auditory and visual articulatory information, and thus requires the perception of temporal synchrony between this information. There is evidence that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty with auditory speech perception but it is not known if this is also true for the integration of auditory and visual speech. Twenty Spanish-speaking children with SLI, twenty typically developing age-matched Spanish-speaking children, and twenty Spanish-speaking children matched for MLU-w participated in an eye-tracking study to investigate the perception of audiovisual speech synchrony.

The interplay between input and initial biases: asymmetries in vowel perception during the first year of life.

Vowels with extreme articulatory-acoustic properties act as natural referents. Infant perceptual asymmetries point to an underlying bias favoring these referent vowels. However, as language experience is gathered, distributional frequency of speech sounds could modify this initial bias.

The acquisition of phonetic categories in bilingual infants: new data from an anticipatory eye movement paradigm.

Contrasting results have been reported regarding the phonetic acquisition of bilinguals. A lack of discrimination has been observed for certain native contrasts in 8-month-old Catalan-Spanish bilingual infants (Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 2003a), though not in French-English bilingual infants (Burns, Yoshida, Hill & Werker, 2007; Sundara, Polka & Molnar, 2008). At present, the data for Catalan-Spanish bilinguals constitute an exception in the early language acquisition literature.

Distributional Phonetic Learning at 10 Months of Age.

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 native phonetic categories have not yet developed.

Structural generalizations over consonants and vowels in 11-month-old infants.

Recent research has suggested consonants and vowels serve different roles during language processing. While statistical computations are preferentially made over consonants but not over vowels, simple structural generalizations are easily made over vowels but not over consonants. Nevertheless, the origins of this asymmetry are unknown.

Clinical applications of geometrical field matching in radiotherapy based on a new analytical solution.

A new analytical formalism has been published recently that provides all the parameters necessary for geometrical field matching in radiotherapy. The present work applies the general expressions for craniospinal irradiation, breast irradiation with a supraclavicular half-field, and breast irradiation with a supraclavicular full-field. We also explore the formalism as a tool to analyze and compare different techniques.

Stress Pattern Preference in Spanish-Learning Infants: The Role of Syllable Weight.

As a result of exposure, infants acquire biases that conform to the rhythmic properties of their native language. Previous lexical stress preference studies have shown that English- and German-, but not French-learning infants, show a bias toward trochaic words. The present study explores Spanish-learning infants' lexical stress preferential patterns and the role of syllable weight at 9 months of age.

Mortality and cause of death in patients with heart failure: findings at a specialist multidisciplinary heart failure unit.

Introduction And Objectives: Heart failure mortality is similar to or even higher than that due to various cancers. It is usually associated with disease progression, though sudden death has also been reported as a frequent cause of mortality. The objectives of this study were to investigate mortality and its causes in outpatients with heart failure of different etiologies who were treated in a specialist multidisciplinary unit, and to identify associated factors.