Publications by authors named "S S Durrant"

There is an ongoing debate in the United Kingdom and in other countries about whether twice-yearly changes into and out of Daylight Saving Time should be abolished. Opinions are divided about whether any abolition of Daylight Saving Time should result in permanent Standard Time, or year-long Daylight Saving Time. The British Sleep Society concludes from the available scientific evidence that circadian and sleep health are affected negatively by enforced changes of clock time (especially in a forward direction) and positively by the availability of natural daylight during the morning.

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From early on, infants show a preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS), and exposure to IDS has been correlated with language outcome measures such as vocabulary. The present multi-laboratory study explores this issue by investigating whether there is a link between early preference for IDS and later vocabulary size. Infants' preference for IDS was tested as part of the ManyBabies 1 project, and follow-up CDI data were collected from a subsample of this dataset at 18 and 24 months.

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We investigated whether learning an artificial language at 17 months was predictive of children's natural language vocabulary and grammar skills at 54 months. Children at 17 months listened to an artificial language containing non-adjacent dependencies, and were then tested on their learning to segment and to generalise the structure of the language. At 54 months, children were then tested on a range of standardised natural language tasks that assessed receptive and expressive vocabulary and grammar.

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