This study examined the longitudinal associations between parent verbal responsiveness and language 3 years later in 34 toddlers with a diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder. Parent-child play samples were coded for child engagement and communication acts and for parent verbal responsiveness. Measures of responsive verbal behaviors were used to predict language gain scores 3 years later. Par...

Infants differ substantially in their rates of language growth, and slow growth predicts later academic difficulties. In this study, we explored how the amount of speech directed to infants in Spanish-speaking families low in socioeconomic status influenced the development of children's skill in real-time language processing and vocabulary learning. All-day recordings of parent-infant interacti...

Automatic analysis of syntax is one of the core problems in natural language processing. Despite significant advances in syntactic parsing of written text, the application of these techniques to spontaneous spoken language has received more limited attention. The recent explosive growth of online, accessible corpora of spoken language interactions opens up new opportunities for the development ...

this study is an attempt to answer three questions: first, whether there is a difference between the grammatical competence de- velopment of a group of children aged 2;6 vs. a group of children aged 3;6. second, whether there is a relationship between the children’s age and their mlu on the one hand and their speech and the caretakers’ speech on the other. third, whether or not the normal limit...

In child language, consonants often assimilate in primary place of articulation across intervening vowels. In adult language, primary place assimilation occurs only between adjacent consonants. In both cases, the first consonant usually assimilates to the second. The standard analysis of directionality of local assimilation in Optimality Theory uses positional faithfulness to protect the second...

Functional MR imaging for language lateralization was performed in a 6-year-old child before neurosurgical intervention. A passive story-listening task was used; this revealed a bilateral language network. The task was repeated during the same session when the child had fallen asleep and surprisingly yielded strong activation in similar language areas. Our findings suggest that language process...

Language acquisition researchers agree that the grammar the child constructs is the result of the interplay between an innate capacity for language learning and properties of the input. Researchers differ, however, on the weight one should give to the input, and which properties of the input are necessary for the child to converge on a grammar that is like the adult grammar. Since we know that ...