Read my lips! Perception of speech in noise by preschool children with autism and the impact of watching the speaker's face.

Background: Adults and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders show greater difficulties comprehending speech in the presence of noise. Moreover, while neurotypical adults use visual cues on the mouth to help them understand speech in background noise, differences in attention to human faces in autism may affect use of these visual cues. No work has yet examined these skills in toddlers with ASD, despite the fact that they are frequently faced with noisy, multitalker environments.

The development of infants' responses to mispronunciations: A meta-analysis.

As they develop into mature speakers of their native language, infants must not only learn words but also the sounds that make up those words. To do so, they must strike a balance between accepting speaker-dependent variation (e.g.

Emergence of a consonant bias during the first year of life: New evidence from own-name recognition.

Recent evidence suggests that during the first year of life, a preference for consonant information during lexical processing (consonant bias) emerges, at least for some languages like French. Our study investigated the factors involved in this emergence as well as the developmental consequences for variation in consonant bias emergence. In a series of experiments, we measured 5-, 8-, and 11-month-old French-learning infants orientation times to a consonant or vowel mispronunciation of their own name, which is one of the few word forms familiar to infants at this young age.

Preschoolers' Word-Learning During Storybook Reading Interactions: Comparing Repeated and Elaborated Input.

Purpose Previous research shows that shared storybook reading interactions can function as effective speech and language interventions for young children, helping to improve a variety of skills-including word-learning. This study sought to investigate the potential benefits of elaboration of new words during a single storybook reading with preschoolers. Method Thirty-three typically developing children ages 35-37 months listened to a storybook containing novel words that were either repeated with a definition, repeated with no additional information, or only said once.

Change in maternal speech rate to preverbal infants over the first two years of life.

Aims: Although IDS is typically described as slower than adult-directed speech (ADS), potential impacts of slower speech on language development have not been examined. We explored whether IDS speech rates in 42 mother-infant dyads at four time periods predicted children's language outcomes at two years. Method: We correlated IDS speech rate with child language outcomes at two years, and contrasted outcomes in dyads displaying high/low rate profiles.

Co-activation of the L2 during L1 auditory processing: An ERP cross-modal priming study.

Several studies have shown that unbalanced bilinguals activate both of their languages simultaneously during L2 processing; however, evidence for L2 activation while participants are tested exclusively in their L1 has been more tenuous. Here, we investigate whether bilingual participants implicitly activate the label for a picture in their two languages, and whether labels activated in L2 can prime activation of cross-linguistically related L1 lexical targets. We tested highly proficient early Spanish-Basque bilinguals on an ERP cross-modal priming task conducted only in their L1, Spanish.

The impact of cross-language phonological overlap on bilingual and monolingual toddlers' word recognition.

We examined how L2 exposure early in life modulates toddler word recognition by comparing German-English bilingual and German monolingual toddlers' recognition of words that overlapped to differing degrees, measured by number of phonological features changed, between English and German (e.g., identical, 1-feature change, 2-feature change, 3-feature change, no overlap).

A Meta-Analysis of Infants' Mispronunciation Sensitivity Development.

Before infants become mature speakers of their native language, they must acquire a robust word-recognition system which allows them to strike the balance between allowing some variation (mood, voice, accent) and recognizing variability that potentially changes meaning (e.g. cat vs hat).

Consonant and Vowel Processing in Word Form Segmentation: An Infant ERP Study.

Segmentation skill and the preferential processing of consonants (C-bias) develop during the second half of the first year of life and it has been proposed that these facilitate language acquisition. We used Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neural bases of early word form segmentation, and of the early processing of onset consonants, medial vowels, and coda consonants, exploring how differences in these early skills might be related to later language outcomes. Our results with French-learning eight-month-old infants primarily support previous studies that found that the word familiarity effect in segmentation is developing from a positive to a negative polarity at this age.

Bilinguals implicitly name objects in both their languages: an ERP study.

Upon being presented with a familiar name-known image, monolingual infants and adults implicitly generate the image's label (Meyer et al., 2007; Mani and Plunkett, 2010, 2011; Mani et al., 2012a).

Language nonselective lexical access in bilingual toddlers.

We examined how words from bilingual toddlers' second language (L2) primed recognition of related target words in their first language (L1). On critical trials, prime-target word pairs were either (a) phonologically related, with L2 primes overlapped phonologically with L1 target words [e.g.