In Study 1 we analyzed Italian child-directed-speech (CDS) and selected the three most frequent active transitive sentence frames used with overt subjects. In Study 2 we experimentally investigated how Italian-speaking children aged 2;6, 3;6, and 4;6 comprehended these orders with novel verbs when the cues of animacy, gender, and subject-verb agreement were neutralized. For each trial, children...

Interval-based rhythm metrics were applied to the speech of English, Catalan and Spanish female adults addressing their children (aged 2, 4 and 6 years) and compared with their speech when addressing adults. Results reveal that when mothers speak to their children, their speech is more vocalic and more even-timed than when they address other adults. However, cross-linguistic differences are sti...

In order to acquire their native languages, children must learn richly structured systems with regularities at multiple levels. While structure at different levels could be learned serially, e.g., speech segmentation coming before word-object mapping, redundancies across levels make parallel learning more efficient. For instance, a series of syllables is likely to be a word not only because of ...

We present a corpus of child and child-directed speech of European Portuguese. This corpus results from the expansion of an already existing database (Santos, 2006). It includes around 52 hours of child-adult interaction and now contains 27,595 child utterances and 70,736 adult utterances. The corpus was transcribed according to the CHILDES system (Child Language Data Exchange System) and using...

At first glance, children’s word learning appears to be mostly a problem of learning words like dog and run. However, it is small words like and and or that enable the construction of complex combinatorial language. How do children learn the meaning of these function words? Using transcripts of parentchild interactions, we investigate the cues in child-directed speech that can inform the interp...

Both the input directed to the child, and the child's ability to process that input, are likely to impact the child's language acquisition. We explore how these factors inter-relate by tracking the relationships among: (a) lexical properties of maternal child-directed speech to prelinguistic (7-month-old) infants (N = 121); (b) these infants' abilities to segment lexical targets from conversati...

AIMS The present study was designed to test the hypothesis that mothers of premature infants compared with mothers of term infants differ in the structure which they impose on the vocal exchanges with their infants. METHODS Thirteen mothers and their premature and term babies, were observed at discharge and 2 months later in three situations: free play, changing nappy, and feeding. Maternal c...

Both the input directed to the child, and the child’s ability to process that input, are likely to impact the child’s language acquisition. We explore how these factors inter-relate by tracking the relationships among: (a) lexical properties of maternal child-directed speech to prelinguistic (month-old) infants (N= ); (b) these infants’ abilities to segment lexical targets from conversation...