Connecting the tots: Strong looking-pointing correlations in preschoolers' word learning and implications for continuity in language development.

How does one assess developmental change when the measures themselves change with development? Most developmental studies of word learning use either looking (infants) or pointing (preschoolers and older). With little empirical evidence of the relationship between the two measures, developmental change is difficult to assess. This paper analyzes 914 pointing, looking children (451 female, varied ethnicities, 2.

Minimal gains for minimal pairs: Difficulty in learning similar-sounding words continues into preschool.

A critical indicator of spoken language knowledge is the ability to discern the finest possible distinctions that exist between words in a language-minimal pairs, for example, the distinction between the novel words beesh and peesh. Infants differentiate similar-sounding novel labels like "bih" and "dih" by 17 months of age or earlier in the context of word learning. Adult word learners readily distinguish similar-sounding words.

Language-to-music transfer effects depend on the tone language: Akan vs. East Asian tone languages.

Recent research suggests that speaking a tone language confers benefits in processing pitch in nonlinguistic contexts such as music. This research largely compares speakers of nontone European languages (English, French) with speakers of tone languages in East Asia (Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Thai). However, tone languages exist on multiple continents-notably, languages indigenous to Africa and the Americas.

Preschoolers Have Difficulty Discriminating Novel Minimal-Pair Words.

Purpose: The primary aim was to assess whether children have difficulty distinguishing similar-sounding novel words. The secondary aim was to assess what task characteristics might hinder or facilitate perceptual discrimination.

Method: Three within-subjects experiments tested ninety-nine 3- to 5-year-old children total.

Haunting melodies: Specific memories distort beat perception.

How much does specific previous experience shape immediate perception? Top-down perceptual inference occurs in ambiguous situations. However, similarity-based accounts such as exemplar theory suggest that similar memories resonate with the percept, predicting that detailed previous experiences can shape perception even when bottom-up cues are unambiguous. The current study tests whether specific musical memories influence beat perception only under ambiguity, or more pervasively-that is, even when clear bottom-up beat cues are present.

Perceptual flexibility in word learning: Preschoolers learn words with speech sound variability.

Children's language input is rife with acoustic variability. Much of this variability may facilitate learning by highlighting unvarying, criterial speech attributes. But in many cases, learners experience variation in those criterial attributes themselves, as when hearing speakers with different accents.

How Do You Feel the Rhythm: Dynamic Motor-Auditory Interactions Are Involved in the Imagination of Hierarchical Timing.

Predicting and organizing patterns of events is important for humans to survive in a dynamically changing world. The motor system has been proposed to be actively, and necessarily, engaged in not only the production but the perception of rhythm by organizing hierarchical timing that influences auditory responses. It is not yet well understood how the motor system interacts with the auditory system to perceive and maintain hierarchical structure in time.

Impacts of acoustic-phonetic variability on perceptual development for spoken language: A review.

This article reviews research on when acoustic-phonetic variability facilitates, inhibits, or does not impact perceptual development for spoken language, to illuminate mechanisms by which variability aids learning of language sound patterns. We first summarize structures and sources of variability. We next present proposed mechanisms to account for how and why variability impacts learning.

The interplay of interval models and entrainment models in duration perception.

Despite extensive research demonstrating the effect of temporal context on time perception, its underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. One influential proposal to explain the temporal context effect is McAuley and Jones' (2003) framework that incorporates 2 classic timing models, interval and entrainment models. They demonstrated that listeners' duration estimates were shifted from reality in opposite directions when to-be-judged durations occurred earlier versus later than an expected beat, which is predicted by their entrainment models.

The familiar-melody advantage in auditory perceptual development: Parallels between spoken language acquisition and general auditory perception.

How do learners build up auditory pattern knowledge? Findings from children's spoken word learning suggest more robust auditory representations for highly familiar words than for newly learned words. This argues against spoken language learning as a process of simply acquiring a fixed set of speech sound categories, suggesting instead that specific words may be the relevant units. More generally, one might state this as the specific-learning hypothesis-that acquiring sound pattern knowledge involves learning specific patterns, rather than abstract pattern components.

Accent detection and social cognition: evidence of protracted learning.

How and when do children become aware that speakers have different accents? While adults readily make a variety of subtle social inferences based on speakers' accents, findings from children are more mixed: while one line of research suggests that even infants may be acutely sensitive to accent unfamiliarity, other studies suggest that 5-year-olds have difficulty identifying accents as different from their own. In an attempt to resolve this paradox, the current study assesses American children's sensitivity to American vs. Dutch accents in two situations.

Tone Attrition in Mandarin Speakers of Varying English Proficiency.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether the degree of dominance of Mandarin-English bilinguals' languages affects phonetic processing of tone content in their native language, Mandarin.

Method: We tested 72 Mandarin-English bilingual college students with a range of language-dominance profiles in the 2 languages and ages of acquisition of English. Participants viewed 2 photographs at a time while hearing a familiar Mandarin word referring to 1 photograph.

Speaking a tone language enhances musical pitch perception in 3-5-year-olds.

Young children learn multiple cognitive skills concurrently (e.g., language and music).

Mandarin-English Bilinguals Process Lexical Tones in Newly Learned Words in Accordance with the Language Context.

Previous research has mainly considered the impact of tone-language experience on ability to discriminate linguistic pitch, but proficient bilingual listening requires differential processing of sound variation in each language context. Here, we ask whether Mandarin-English bilinguals, for whom pitch indicates word distinctions in one language but not the other, can process pitch differently in a Mandarin context vs. an English context.

Difficulty in learning similar-sounding words: A developmental stage or a general property of learning?

How are languages learned, and to what extent are learning mechanisms similar in infant native-language (L1) and adult second-language (L2) acquisition? In terms of vocabulary acquisition, we know from the infant literature that the ability to discriminate similar-sounding words at a particular age does not guarantee successful word-meaning mapping at that age (Stager & Werker, 1997). However, it is unclear whether this difficulty arises from developmental limitations of young infants (e.g.

Effects of contextual support on preschoolers' accented speech comprehension.

Young children often hear speech in unfamiliar accents, but relatively little research characterizes their comprehension capacity. The current study tested preschoolers' comprehension of familiar-accented versus unfamiliar-accented speech with varying levels of contextual support from sentence frames (full sentences vs. isolated words) and from visual context (four salient pictured alternatives vs.

Apples and Oranges: Developmental Discontinuities in Spoken-Language Processing?

Much research focuses on speech processing in infancy, sometimes generating the impression that speech-sound categories do not develop further. Yet other studies suggest substantial plasticity throughout mid-childhood. Differences between infant versus child and adult experimental methods currently obscure how language processing changes across childhood, calling for approaches that span development.

Ups and Downs in Auditory Development: Preschoolers' Sensitivity to Pitch Contour and Timbre.

Much research has explored developing sound representations in language, but less work addresses developing representations of other sound patterns. This study examined preschool children's musical representations using two different tasks: discrimination and sound-picture association. Melodic contour--a musically relevant property--and instrumental timbre, which is (arguably) less musically relevant, were tested.

Children and adults integrate talker and verb information in online processing.

Children seem able to efficiently interpret a variety of linguistic cues during speech comprehension, yet have difficulty interpreting sources of nonlinguistic and paralinguistic information that accompany speech. The current study asked whether (paralinguistic) voice-activated role knowledge is rapidly interpreted in coordination with a linguistic cue (a sentential action) during speech comprehension in an eye-tracked sentence comprehension task with children (ages 3-10 years) and college-aged adults. Participants were initially familiarized with 2 talkers who identified their respective roles (e.

Tipping the scales: auditory cue weighting changes over development.

How does auditory processing change over development? This study assessed preschoolers' and adults' sensitivity to pitch contour, pitch height, and timbre in an association-memory paradigm, with both explicit (overt recognition) and implicit measures (visual fixations to melody-linked objects). In the first 2 experiments, child and adult participants associated each of 2 melodies with a cartoon picture, and recognition was tested. Experiment 1 pitted pitch contour cues against pitch height cues, and Experiment 2 pitted contour cues against timbre cues.

Gradient language dominance affects talker learning.

Traditional conceptions of spoken language assume that speech recognition and talker identification are computed separately. Neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies imply some separation between the two faculties, but recent perceptual studies suggest better talker recognition in familiar languages than unfamiliar languages. A familiar-language benefit in talker recognition potentially implies strong ties between the two domains.

Gradient phonological inconsistency affects vocabulary learning.

Learners frequently experience phonologically inconsistent input, such as exposure to multiple accents. Yet, little is known about the consequences of phonological inconsistency for language learning. The current study examines vocabulary acquisition with different degrees of phonological inconsistency, ranging from no inconsistency (e.

Differences in talker recognition by preschoolers and adults.

Talker variability in speech influences language processing from infancy through adulthood and is inextricably embedded in the very cues that identify speech sounds. Yet little is known about developmental changes in the processing of talker information. On one account, children have not yet learned to separate speech sound variability from talker-varying cues in speech, making them more sensitive than adults to talker variation.

Phonological similarity and mutual exclusivity: on-line recognition of atypical pronunciations in 3--5-year-olds.

Recent research has considered the phonological specificity of children's word representations, but few studies have examined the flexibility of those representations. Tolerating acoustic-phonetic deviations has been viewed as a negative in terms of discriminating minimally different word forms, but may be a positive in an increasingly multicultural society where children encounter speakers with variable accents. To explore children's on-line processing of accented speech, preschoolers heard atypically pronounced words (e.

Preschoolers' use of talker information in on-line comprehension.

A crucial part of language development is learning how various social and contextual language-external factors constrain an utterance's meaning. This learning process is poorly understood. Five experiments addressed one hundred thirty-one 3- to 5-year-old children's use of one such socially relevant information source: talker characteristics.