Journal of Child Language最新文献

This longitudinal study investigated modifications in lexical tones and intonation in Cantonese infant-directed speech (IDS) to children aged 15 and 23 months. The results showed that to children at both ages, mothers increased intonational pitch height and pitch variability across utterances, and produced lexical tones with generally larger tonal space and greater intra-talker tone variation within categories in IDS compared to adult-directed speech. No significant changes were found in either lexical tones or intonation in IDS between the two ages. In addition, positive correlations were found between the degree of age-related changes in tonal space and intonational exaggerations in IDS as children grow older. The findings were discussed with a focus on the co-occurrence of an increase in tone variation along with tonal space expansion, the age-related changes in lexical tones and intonation, and the associations between the lexical and prosodic pitch modifications.

We investigated whether individuals with Williams Syndrome (WS) produce language with a bias towards statistical properties of word combinations rather than grammatical rules, resulting in an overuse of holistically stored, familiar phrases. We analysed continuous speech samples from English children with WS (n = 12), typically developing (TD) controls matched on chronological age (n = 15) and TD controls matched on language age (n = 14). Alongside word count, utterance length, grammatical complexity, and morphosyntactic errors, we measured familiarity of expressions by computing collocation strength of each word combination. The WS group produced stronger collocations than both control groups. Moreover, the WS group produced fewer complex sentences, shorter utterances, and more frequent function words than chronological-age matched controls. Language in WS may appear more typical than it is because familiar, holistically processed expressions mask grammatical and other difficulties.

English-speaking autistic children use the hesitation marker um less often than non-autistic children but use uh at a similar rate. It is unclear why this is the case. We employed a sample of Dutch-speaking children from the Preschool Brain Imaging and Behavior Project to examine hesitation markers in autistic and non-autistic preschoolers with the aim to 1) make a crosslinguistic comparison of hesitation marker usage and 2) examine hypotheses regarding the underlying linguistic mechanisms of hesitation markers: the symptom hypothesis and the signal hypothesis. We found initial group differences in all hesitation markers but these results were rendered insignificant after controlling for age, sex and nonverbal cognition. We found significant correlations between hesitation marker usage and expressive and receptive language, but not autism traits. Lastly, we show interesting cross-linguistic differences in hesitation marker usage between Dutch-speaking participants and previously described English-speaking participants, such as a preference for um over uh.

We present an exploratory cross-linguistic analysis of the quantity of target-child-directed speech and adult-directed speech in North American English (US & Canadian), United Kingdom English, Argentinian Spanish, Tseltal (Tenejapa, Mayan), and Yélî Dnye (Rossel Island, Papuan), using annotations from 69 children aged 2-36 months. Using a novel methodological approach, our cross-linguistic and cross-cultural findings support prior work suggesting that target-child-directed speech quantities are stable across early development, while adult-directed speech decreases. A preponderance of speech from women was found to a similar degree across groups, with less target-child-directed speech from men and children in the North American samples than elsewhere. Consistently across groups, children also heard more adult-directed than target-child-directed speech. Finally, the numbers of talkers present in any given clip strongly impacted children's moment-to-moment input quantities. These findings illustrate how the structure of home life impacts patterns of early language exposure across diverse developmental contexts.

While adult studies show that consonants are more important than vowels in lexical processing tasks, the developmental trajectory of this consonant bias varies cross-linguistically. This study tested whether British English-learning 11-month-old infants' recognition of familiar word forms is more reliant on consonants than vowels, as found by Poltrock and Nazzi (2015) in French. After establishing that infants prefer listening to a list of familiar words over pseudowords (Experiment 1), Experiment 2 examined preference for consonant versus vowel mispronunciations of these words. Infants listened to both alterations equally. In Experiment 3, using a simplified version of the task with one familiar word only ('mummy'), infants' preference for its correct pronunciation over a consonant or a vowel change confirmed an equal sensitivity to both alterations. British English-learning infants' word form recognition appears to be equally impacted by consonant and vowel information, providing further evidence that initial lexical processes vary cross-linguistically.

This study is a validation of the LENA system for the Italian language. In Study 1, to test LENA's accuracy, seventy-two 10-minute samples extracted from daylong LENA recordings were manually transcribed for 12 children longitudinally observed at 1;0 and 2;0. We found strong correlations between LENA and human estimates in the number of Adult Word Count (AWC) and Child Vocalisations Count (CVC) and a weak correlation between LENA and human estimates in Conversational Turns Count (CTC). In Study 2, to test the concurrent validity, direct and indirect language measures were considered on a sample of 54 recordings (19 children). Correlational analyses showed that LENA's CVC and CTC were significantly related to the children's vocal production, a parent report measure of prelexical vocalizations and the vocal reactivity scores. These results confirm that the automatic analyses performed by the LENA device are reliable and powerful for studying language development in Italian-speaking infants.

Previous studies have shown that caregivers' sensitive, responsive interactions with young children can boost language development. We explored the association between caregivers' sensitivity and the vocabulary development of their 8-to-36-month-olds during COVID-19 when family routines were unexpectedly disrupted. Measuring caregivers' sensitivity from home interaction videos at three timepoints, we found that children who experienced more-sensitive concurrent interactions had higher receptive and expressive vocabularies (N=100). Children whose caregivers showed more-sensitive interactions at the beginning of the pandemic showed greater expressive vocabulary growth six (but not 12) months later (n=58). Significant associations with receptive vocabulary growth were not observed. Our findings highlight the importance of sensitivity at a time when other positive influences on language development were compromised.