Child-directed spoken data is the ideal source of support for claims about children’s linguistic environments. However, phonological transcriptions of child-directed speech are scarce, compared to sources like adult-directed speech or text data. Acquiring reliable descriptions of children’s phonological environments from more readily accessible sources would mean considerable savings of time an...

This paper validates a parametric approach to intonation acquisition research [1] using child-directed speech data. An advantage of this approach is that it can be used for studying child speech as well as adult speech. Within the field of prosody acquisition it reconciles independent approaches to child prosody with ToBI-based approaches. In this paper we substantiate this claim by showing tha...

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...

Extensive experience in written language might provide children the opportunity to learn to read in the same manner they learn spoken language. One potential type of written language immersion is reading aloud to children, which is additionally valuable because the vocabulary in picture books is richer and more extensive than that found in child-directed speech. This study continues a compariso...

Young children's language experiences and language outcomes are highly variable. Research in recent decades has focused on understanding the extent to which family socioeconomic status (SES) relates to parents' language input to their children and, subsequently, children's language learning. Here, we first review research demonstrating differences in the quantity and quality of language that ch...

Many approaches to early word learning posit that children assume a one-to-one mapping of form and meaning. However, children's early vocabularies contain homophones, words that violate that assumption. Children might learn such words by exploiting prosodic differences between homophone meanings that are associated with lemma frequency (Gahl, 2008). Such differences have not yet been documented...

Fathers' child-directed speech across two contexts was examined. Father-child dyads from sixty-nine low-income families were videotaped interacting during book reading and toy play when children were 2;0. Fathers used more diverse vocabulary and asked more questions during book reading while their mean length of utterance was longer during toy play. Variation in these specific characteristics o...

Child-directed speech is argued to facilitate language development, and is found cross-linguistically and cross-culturally to varying degrees. However, previous research has generally focused on short samples of child-caregiver interaction, often in the lab or with experimenters present. We test the generalizability of this phenomenon with an initial descriptive analysis of the speech heard by ...

Is self-directed speech critical to cognitive processes supporting complex, goal-directed behavior? If so, how? An influential developmental hypothesis is that children talk to themselves to support cognitive control processes, and that with age this speech becomes increasingly covert and strategic. However, while many studies suggest language supports cognitive control, evidence that self-dire...