More Than Looks: Exploring Methods to Test Phonological Discrimination in the Sign Language Kata Kolok.

The lack of diversity in the language sciences has increasingly been criticized as it holds the potential for producing flawed theories. Research on (i) geographically diverse language communities and (ii) on sign languages is necessary to corroborate, sharpen, and extend existing theories. This study contributes a case study of adapting a well-established paradigm to study the acquisition of sign phonology in Kata Kolok, a sign language of rural Bali, Indonesia.

The Language Environment at Home of Children With (a Suspicion of) a Developmental Language Disorder and Relations With Standardized Language Measures.

Purpose: This study compares the home language environments of children with (a suspicion of) developmental language disorder (DLD) with that of children with typical development (TD). It does so by adopting new technology that automatically provides metrics about children's language environment (Language ENvironment Analysis [LENA]). In addition, relationships between LENA metrics and standardized language tests are explored in the DLD group.

Development of sign phonology in Kata Kolok.

Much like early speech, early signing is characterised by modifications. Sign language phonology has been analysed on the feature level since the 1980s, yet acquisition studies predominately examine handshape, location, and movement. This study is the first to analyse the acquisition of phonology in the sign language of a Balinese village with a vibrant signing community and applies the same feature analysis to adult and child data.

Robustness of the cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants: A close multi-center replication of Kovács and Mehler (2009).

We present an exact replication of Experiment 2 from Kovács and Mehler's 2009 study, which showed that 7-month-old infants who are raised bilingually exhibit a cognitive advantage. In the experiment, a sound cue, following an AAB or ABB pattern, predicted the appearance of a visual stimulus on the screen. The stimulus appeared on one side of the screen for nine trials and then switched to the other side.

Robustness of the rule-learning effect in 7-month-old infants: A close, multicenter replication of Marcus et al. (1999).

We conducted a close replication of the seminal work by Marcus and colleagues from 1999, which showed that after a brief auditory exposure phase, 7-month-old infants were able to learn and generalize a rule to novel syllables not previously present in the exposure phase. This work became the foundation for the theoretical framework by which we assume that infants are able to learn abstract representations and generalize linguistic rules. While some extensions on the original work have shown evidence of rule learning, the outcomes are mixed, and an exact replication of Marcus et al.

Early Productive Vocabulary Composition as Precursor of Dyslexia.

Purpose: The aim of this study was to gain more insight into the linguistic characterization of dyslexia by investigating vocabulary acquisition. In a previous study, vocabulary at 17 months of age appeared to be related to familial risk (FR) of dyslexia. The aim of this study was to investigate how the differences in lexical composition further develop up to 3 years (35 months) of age and, more importantly, to what extent these differences can be considered specific precursors of dyslexia later on.

Infants' Implicit Rhyme Perception in Child Songs and Its Relationship With Vocabulary.

Rhyme perception is an important predictor for future literacy. Assessing rhyme abilities, however, commonly requires children to make explicit rhyme judgements on single words. Here we explored whether infants already implicitly process rhymes in natural rhyming contexts (child songs) and whether this response correlates with later vocabulary size.

Contrast and Conflict in Dutch Vowels.

The nature of phonological representations has been extensively studied in phonology and psycholinguistics. While full specification is still the norm in psycholinguistic research, underspecified representations may better account for perceptual asymmetries. In this paper, we report on a mismatch negativity (MMN) study with Dutch listeners who took part in a passive oddball paradigm to investigate when the brain notices the difference between expected and observed vowels.

Word Recognition and Word Prediction in Preschoolers With (a Suspicion of) a Developmental Language Disorder: Evidence From Eye Tracking.

Purpose This study compares online word recognition and prediction in preschoolers with (a suspicion of) a developmental language disorder (DLD) and typically developing (TD) controls. Furthermore, it investigates correlations between these measures and the link between online and off-line language scores in the DLD group. Method Using the visual world paradigm, Dutch children ages 3;6 (years;months) with (a suspicion of) DLD ( = 51) and TD peers ( = 31) listened to utterances such as, "Kijk, een hoed!" () in a word recognition task, and sentences such as, "Hé, hij leest gewoon een boek" (literal translation: ) in a word prediction task, while watching a target and distractor picture.

Modeling the Influence of Language Input Statistics on Children's Speech Production.

We trained a computational model (the Chunk-Based Learner; CBL) on a longitudinal corpus of child-caregiver interactions in English to test whether one proposed statistical learning mechanism-backward transitional probability-is able to predict children's speech productions with stable accuracy throughout the first few years of development. We predicted that the model less accurately reconstructs children's speech productions as they grow older because children gradually begin to generate speech using abstracted forms rather than specific "chunks" from their speech environment. To test this idea, we trained the model on both recently encountered and cumulative speech input from a longitudinal child language corpus.

Six-month-old infants recognize phrases in song and speech.

Infants exploit acoustic boundaries to perceptually organize phrases in speech. This prosodic parsing ability is well-attested and is a cornerstone to the development of speech perception and grammar. However, infants also receive linguistic input in child songs.

Contrasting behavioral looking procedures: a case study on infant speech segmentation.

This paper compared three different procedures common in infant speech perception research: a headturn preference procedure (HPP) and a central-fixation (CF) procedure with either automated eye-tracking (CF-ET) or manual coding (CF-M). In theory, such procedures all measure the same underlying speech perception and learning mechanisms and the choice between them should ideally be irrelevant in unveiling infant preference. However, the ManyBabies study (ManyBabies Consortium, 2019), a cross-laboratory collaboration on infants' preference for child-directed speech, revealed that choice of procedure can modulate effect sizes.

Infants Segment Words from Songs-An EEG Study.

Children's songs are omnipresent and highly attractive stimuli in infants' input. Previous work suggests that infants process linguistic-phonetic information from simplified sung melodies. The present study investigated whether infants learn words from ecologically valid children's songs.

Infants' sensitivity to rhyme in songs.

Children's songs often contain rhyming words at phrase endings. In this study, we investigated whether infants can already recognize this phonological pattern in songs. Earlier studies using lists of spoken words were equivocal on infants' spontaneous processing of rhymes (Hayes et al.

Symbouki: a meta-analysis on the emergence of sound symbolism in early language acquisition.

Adults and toddlers systematically associate pseudowords such as "bouba" and "kiki" with round and spiky shapes, respectively, a sound symbolic phenomenon known as the "bouba-kiki effect". To date, whether this sound symbolic effect is a property of the infant brain present at birth or is a learned aspect of language perception remains unknown. Yet, solving this question is fundamental for our understanding of early language acquisition.

Second language attainment and first language attrition: The case of VOT in immersed Dutch-German late bilinguals.

Speech of late bilinguals has frequently been described in terms of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) from the native language (L1) to the second language (L2), but CLI from the L2 to the L1 has received relatively little attention. This article addresses L2 attainment and L1 attrition in voicing systems through measures of voice onset time (VOT) in two groups of Dutch-German late bilinguals in the Netherlands. One group comprises native speakers of Dutch and the other group comprises native speakers of German, and the two groups further differ in their degree of L2 immersion.

How Native Prosody Affects Pitch Processing during Word Learning in Limburgian and Dutch Toddlers and Adults.

In this study, Limburgian and Dutch 2.5- to 4-year-olds and adults took part in a word learning experiment. Following the procedure employed by Quam and Swingley (2010) and Singh et al.

No perceptual reorganization for Limburgian tones? A cross-linguistic investigation with 6- to 12-month-old infants.

Despite the fact that many of the world's languages use lexical tone, the majority of language acquisition studies has focused on non-tone languages. Research on tone languages has typically investigated well-known tone languages such as Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese. The current study looked at a Limburgian dialect of Dutch that uses lexical pitch differences, albeit in a rather restricted way.

The more, the better? Behavioral and neural correlates of frequent and infrequent vowel exposure.

A central assumption in the perceptual attunement literature holds that exposure to a speech sound contrast leads to improvement in native speech sound processing. However, whether the amount of exposure matters for this process has not been put to a direct test. We elucidated indicators of frequency-dependent perceptual attunement by comparing 5-8-month-old Dutch infants' discrimination of tokens containing a highly frequent [hɪt-he:t] and a highly infrequent [hʏt-hø:t] native vowel contrast as well as a non-native [hɛt-haet] vowel contrast in a behavioral visual habituation paradigm (Experiment 1).

Dutch and German 3-Year-Olds' Representations of Voicing Alternations.

The voicing contrast is neutralized syllable and word finally in Dutch and German, leading to alternations within the morphological paradigm (e.g., Dutch 'bed(s)', be[t]-be[d]en, German 'dog(s)', Hun[t]-Hun[d]e).

Using Distributional Statistics to Acquire Morphophonological Alternations: Evidence from Production and Perception.

Morphophonological alternations, such as the voicing alternation that arises in a morphological paradigm due to final-devoicing in Dutch, are notoriously difficult for children to acquire. This has previously been attributed to their unpredictability. In fact, the presence or absence of a voicing alternation is partly predictable if the phonological context of the word is taken into account, and adults have been shown to use this information (Ernestus and Baayen, 2003).

Language-general biases and language-specific experience contribute to phonological detail in toddlers' word representations.

Although toddlers in their 2nd year of life generally have phonologically detailed representations of words, a consistent lack of sensitivity to certain kinds of phonological changes has been reported. The origin of these insensitivities is poorly understood, and uncovering their cause is crucial for obtaining a complete picture of early phonological development. The present study explored the origins of the insensitivity to the change from coronal to labial consonants.

Modelling the Noise-Robustness of Infants' Word Representations: The Impact of Previous Experience.

During language acquisition, infants frequently encounter ambient noise. We present a computational model to address whether specific acoustic processing abilities are necessary to detect known words in moderate noise--an ability attested experimentally in infants. The model implements a general purpose speech encoding and word detection procedure.

Dutch and English toddlers' use of linguistic cues in predicting upcoming turn transitions.

Adults achieve successful coordination during conversation by using prosodic and lexicosyntactic cues to predict upcoming changes in speakership. We examined the relative weight of these linguistic cues in the prediction of upcoming turn structure by toddlers learning Dutch (Experiment 1; N = 21) and British English (Experiment 2; N = 20) and adult control participants (Dutch: N = 16; English: N = 20). We tracked participants' anticipatory eye movements as they watched videos of dyadic puppet conversation.

Even at 4 months, a labial is a good enough coronal, but not vice versa.

Numerous studies have revealed an asymmetry tied to the perception of coronal place of articulation: participants accept a labial mispronunciation of a coronal target, but not vice versa. Whether or not this asymmetry is based on language-general properties or arises from language-specific experience has been a matter of debate. The current study suggests a bias of the first type by documenting an early, cross-linguistic asymmetry related to coronal place of articulation.