Utterance-final position and pitch marking aid word learning in school-age children.

We investigated the effects of word order and prosody on word learning in school-age children. Third graders viewed photographs belonging to one of three semantic categories while hearing four-word nonsense utterances containing a target word. In the condition, all words had the same pitch and, across trials, the position of the target word was varied systematically within each utterance.

Noun plural production in preschoolers with early cochlear implantation: an experimental study of Dutch and German.

Objectives: Studies investigating language skills of children after cochlear implantation usually present general measures of expressive/receptive vocabulary and grammar and rarely tackle the acquisition of specific language phenomena (word classes, grammatical constructions, word forms, etc.). Furthermore, research is largely restricted to children acquiring English.

How children perceive fractals: hierarchical self-similarity and cognitive development.

The ability to understand and generate hierarchical structures is a crucial component of human cognition, available in language, music, mathematics and problem solving. Recursion is a particularly useful mechanism for generating complex hierarchies by means of self-embedding rules. In the visual domain, fractals are recursive structures in which simple transformation rules generate hierarchies of infinite depth.

Early noun plurals in German: regularity, productivity or default?

The acquisition of German plurals has been the focus of controversy in the last decade. In this paper we claim that degree of productivity (i.e.