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Do words that are both associatively and taxonomically related prime each other in the infant mental lexicon? We explore the impact of these semantic relations in the emerging lexicon. Using the head‐turn preference procedure, we show that 18‐month‐old infants have begun to construct a semantic network of associatively and taxonomically related words, such as dog‐cat or apple‐cheese. We demonstrate that priming between words is longer‐lasting when the relationship is both taxonomic and associative, as opposed to purely taxonomic, reflecting the associative boost reported in the adult priming literature. Our results demonstrate that 18‐month‐old infants are able to construct a lexical‐semantic network based on associative and taxonomic relations between words in the network, and that lexical‐semantic links are more robust when they are both associative and taxonomic in character. Furthermore, the manner in which activation is propagated through the emerging lexical‐semantic network appears to depend upon the type of semantic relation between words. We argue that 18‐month‐old infants have a mental lexicon that shares important structural and processing properties with that of the adult system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report on an analysis of spontaneous gesture production in 2‐year‐old children who come from three countries (Italy, United Kingdom, Australia) and who speak two languages (Italian, English), in an attempt to tease apart the influence of language and culture when comparing children from different cultural and linguistic environments. Eighty‐seven monolingual children aged 24–30 months completed an experimental task measuring their comprehension and production of nouns and predicates. The Italian children scored significantly higher than the other groups on all lexical measures. With regard to gestures, British children produced significantly fewer pointing and speech combinations compared to Italian and Australian children, who did not differ from each other. In contrast, Italian children produced significantly more representational gestures than the other two groups. We conclude that spoken language development is primarily influenced by the input language over gesture production, whereas the combination of cultural and language environments affects gesture production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the methods used in a study on the norms and effects of linguistic distance in a sample of 430 bilingual toddlers learning British English and additional languages. Study highlights include measurement of four parent-assessed outcome variables at 24 months, collection of data for 430 children between February 2014 and July 2016, and a list of all variables and predictors used in the analyses.

The majority of the world's children grow up learning two or more languages. The study of early bilingualism is central to current psycholinguistics, offering insights into issues such as transfer and interference in development. From an applied perspective, it poses a universal challenge to language assessment practices throughout childhood, as typically developing bilingual children usually underperform relative to monolingual norms when assessed in one language only. We measured vocabulary with Communicative Development Inventories for 372 24-month-old toddlers learning British English and one Additional Language out of a diverse set of 13 (Bengali, Cantonese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hindi-Urdu, Italian, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Welsh). We furthered theoretical understanding of bilingual development by showing, for the first time, that linguistic distance between the child's two languages predicts vocabulary outcome, with phonological overlap related to expressive vocabulary, and word order typology and morphological complexity related to receptive vocabulary, in the Additional Language. Our study also has crucial clinical implications: we have developed the first bilingual norms for expressive and receptive vocabulary for 24-month-olds learning British English and an Additional Language. These norms were derived from factors identified as uniquely predicting CDI vocabulary measures: the relative amount of English versus the Additional Language in child-directed input and parental overheard speech, and infant gender. The resulting UKBTAT tool was able to accurately predict the English vocabulary of an additional group of 58 bilinguals learning an Additional Language outside our target range. This offers a pragmatic method for the assessment of children in the majority language when no tool exists in the Additional Language. Our findings also suggest that the effect of linguistic distance might extend beyond bilinguals' acquisition of early vocabulary to encompass broader cognitive processes, and could constitute a key factor in the study of the debated bilingual advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at a study that measures the relative contribution of linguistic distance to the acquisition of a bilingual toddler's two languages. Study highlights include phonological overlap between Additional Languages and British English, development of bilingual norms specified for the proportion of a particular language that a child hears in the input, and the feasibility of assessing bilingual toddlers in the majority language only.

The article looks at a study that establishes the reliability of UK Bilingual Toddlers Assessment Tool for bilingual children learning British English and its application to non-target additional language learners. Topics covered include the Plymouth Language Exposure Questionnaire, requirement for predictors to reach significance in the analysis of covariances and the subsequent linear mixed models, and the difference between a child's predicted and observed scores as a percentile.

The article looks at a study that estimates the effect of linguistic distance on vocabulary development. Study highlights include a preliminary selection of significant predictors from analysis of covariance, the use of test language or TestLang as a repeated measures factor to examine the differential impact of predictors on English and Additional Language, and strong associations between Language Community and predictor variables.

The ideal of scientific progress is that we accumulate measurements and integrate these into theory, but recent discussion of replicability issues has cast doubt on whether psychological research conforms to this model. Developmental research-especially with infant participants-also has discipline-specific replicability challenges, including small samples and limited measurement methods. Inspired by collaborative replication efforts in cognitive and social psychology, we describe a proposal for assessing and promoting replicability in infancy research: large-scale, multi-laboratory replication efforts aiming for a more precise understanding of key developmental phenomena. The ManyBabies project, our instantiation of this proposal, will not only help us estimate how robust and replicable these phenomena are, but also gain new theoretical insights into how they vary across ages, linguistic communities, and measurement methods. This project has the potential for a variety of positive outcomes, including less-biased estimates of theoretically important effects, estimates of variability that can be used for later study planning, and a series of best-practices blueprints for future infancy research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the end of their first year of life, infants' representations of familiar words contain phonetic detail; yet little is known about the nature of these representations at the very beginning of word learning. Bouchon et al. () showed that French-learning 5-month-olds could detect a vowel change in their own name and not a consonant change, but also that infants reacted to the acoustic distance between vowels. Here, we tested British English-learning 5-month-olds in a similar study to examine whether the acoustic/phonological characteristics of the native language shape the nature of the acoustic/phonetic cues that infants pay attention to. In the first experiment, British English-learning infants failed to recognize their own name compared to a mispronunciation of initial consonant (e.g., Molly versus Nolly) or vowel (e.g., April versus Ipril). Yet in the second experiment, they did so when the contrasted name was phonetically dissimilar (e.g., Sophie versus Amber). Differences in phoneme category (stops versus continuants) between the correct consonant versus the incorrect one significantly predicted infants' own name recognition in the first experiment. Altogether, these data suggest that infants might enter into a phonetic mode of processing through different paths depending on the acoustic characteristics of their native language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consonants and vowels differ acoustically and articulatorily, but also functionally: Consonants are more relevant for lexical processing, and vowels for prosodic/syntactic processing. These functional biases could be powerful bootstrapping mechanisms for learning language, but their developmental origin remains unclear. The relative importance of consonants and vowels at the onset of lexical acquisition was assessed in French-learning 5-month-olds by testing sensitivity to minimal phonetic changes in their own name. Infants' reactions to mispronunciations revealed sensitivity to vowel but not consonant changes. Vowels were also more salient (on duration and intensity) but less distinct (on spectrally based measures) than consonants. Lastly, vowel (but not consonant) mispronunciation detection was modulated by acoustic factors, in particular spectrally based distance. These results establish that consonant changes do not affect lexical recognition at 5 months, while vowel changes do; the consonant bias observed later in development does not emerge until after 5 months through additional language exposure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A substantial body of evidence demonstrates that infants understand the meaning of spoken words from as early as 6 months. Yet little is known about their ability to do so in the absence of any visual referent, which would offer diagnostic evidence for an adult-like, symbolic interpretation of words and their use in language mediated thought. We used the head-turn preference procedure to examine whether infants can generate implicit meanings from word forms alone as early as 18 months of age, and whether they are sensitive to meaningful relationships between words. In one condition, toddlers were presented with lists of words taken from the same taxonomic category (e.g. animals or body parts). In a second condition, words taken from two other categories (e.g. clothes and food items) were interleaved within the same list. Listening times were found to be longer in the related-category condition than in the mixed-category condition, suggesting that infants extract the meaning of spoken words and are sensitive to the semantic relatedness between these words. Our results show that infants have begun to construct the rudiments of a semantic system based on taxonomic relations even before they enter a period of accelerated vocabulary growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Bilingual children are under-referred due to an ostensible expectation that they lag behind their monolingual peers in their English acquisition. The recommendations of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT) state that bilingual children should be assessed in both the languages known by the children. However, despite these recommendations, a majority of speech and language professionals report that they assess bilingual children only in English as bilingual children come from a wide array of language backgrounds and standardized language measures are not available for the majority of these. Moreover, even when such measures do exist, they are not tailored for bilingual children. Aims It was asked whether a cut-off exists in the proportion of exposure to English at which one should expect a bilingual toddler to perform as well as a monolingual on a test standardized for monolingual English-speaking children. Methods & Procedures Thirty-five bilingual 2;6-year-olds exposed to British English plus an additional language and 36 British monolingual toddlers were assessed on the auditory component of the Preschool Language Scale, British Picture Vocabulary Scale and an object-naming measure. All parents completed the Oxford Communicative Development Inventory (Oxford CDI) and an exposure questionnaire that assessed the proportion of English in the language input. Where the CDI existed in the bilingual's additional language, these data were also collected. Outcomes & Results Hierarchical regression analyses found the proportion of exposure to English to be the main predictor of the performance of bilingual toddlers. Bilingual toddlers who received 60% exposure to English or more performed like their monolingual peers on all measures. K-means cluster analyses and Levene variance tests confirmed the estimated English exposure cut-off at 60% for all language measures. Finally, for one additional language for which we had multiple participants, additional language CDI production scores were significantly inversely related to the amount of exposure to English. Conclusions & Implications Typically developing 2;6-year-olds who are bilingual in English and an additional language and who hear English 60% of the time or more, perform equivalently to their typically developing monolingual peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infants in their first year manifest selective patterns of discrimination between languages and between accents of the same language. Prosodic differences are held to be important in whether languages can be discriminated, together with the infant's familiarity with one or both of the accents heard. However, the nature of the prosodic cues that actually facilitate infant discrimination has not been directly examined. We analyzed the accent discrimination of 5- and 7-month-old British English infants, looking for durational features that could predict a range of discrimination results using the Headturn Preference Procedure. We previously found that both 5- and 7-month-olds based in Plymouth could discriminate Plymouth-accented and Welsh-accented English, while 5-month-olds could not discriminate Welsh-accented and Scottish-accented English. Most surprisingly, 7-month-olds failed to discriminate Plymouth-accented and French-accented English. From half of all utterances used in these four experiments, we calculated a range of durational metrics, both globally across utterances and locally at utterance-final edges. Utterance-edge metrics were the relative duration of the final consonant+vowel interval (nfinalCV) and the final vowel alone (nfinalV). Separately for 5- and 7-month-olds, we determined the difference in scores for all durational metrics between: (a) familiar training and novel test utterances and (b) familiar test and novel test utterances. Regression analyses showed unique predictors of discrimination. For 5-month-olds, the predictor was the difference in nfinalCV between familiar training and novel test utterances. For 7-month-olds, the predictor was the difference in finalV between familiar test and novel test utterances. This demonstrates an early sensitivity to precisely those localized timing features that are useful across languages for segmentation. We therefore predict that similar sensitivity should be shown in infants of other language backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates infants' discrimination abilities for familiar and unfamiliar regional English accents. Using a variation of the head-turn preference procedure, 5-month-old infants demonstrated that they were able to distinguish between their own South-West English accent and an unfamiliar Welsh English accent. However, this distinction was not seen when two unfamiliar accents (Welsh English and Scottish English) were presented to the infants, indicating they had not acquired the general ability to distinguish between regional varieties, but only the distinction between their home accent and unfamiliar regional variations. This ability was also confirmed with 7-month-olds, challenging recent claims that infants lose their sensitivity to dialects at around that age. Taken together, our results argue in favor of an early sensitivity to the intonation system of languages, and to the early learning of accent-specific intonation and potentially segmental patterns. Implications for the development of accent normalization abilities are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate the interaction between segmental and supra-segmental stress-related information in early word learning, two experiments were conducted with 20- to 24-month-old English-learning children. In an adaptation of the object categorization study designed by , children were presented with pairs of novel objects whose labels differed by their initial consonant (Experiment 1) or their medial consonant (Experiment 2). Words were produced with a stress initial (trochaic) or a stress final (iambic) pattern. In both experiments successful word learning was established when the to-be-remembered contrast was embedded in a stressed syllable, but not when embedded in unstressed syllables. This was independent of the overall word pattern, trochaic or iambic, or the location of the phonemic contrast, word-initial or -medial. Results are discussed in light of the use of phonetic information in early lexical acquisition, highlighting the role of lexical stress and ambisyllabicity in early word processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines children's metaphonological awareness for accent-related information in connected speech. In the first experiment, 5- to 6-year-old French-speaking children were asked to discriminate between Southern and Northern accented French in a sentence categorization task. It was found that these children were not able to reliably distinguish between these native variations of their own language, but were able to distinguish between their own accent and a strong foreign accent in Experiment 2. These findings were also replicated using a speaker discrimination task in Experiment 3, where children were asked to detect pairs of speakers sharing the same accent amongst speaker pairs with different accents. Whilst these experiments have shown that 5- to 6-year-old children do not use non-familiar regional accents as a discriminatory cue, they are able to perceive the differences between accents, as demonstrated in the AX task used in Experiment 4. The factors underlying the relative lack of awareness for a regional accent as opposed to a foreign accent in childhood are discussed, especially regarding the amount of exposure and the learnability of both types of accents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attempts to determine minimal information required for newborn infants to discriminate unfamiliar voices. Presentation of single disyllabic words uttered by male and female speakers; Use of high-amplitude sucking procedure; Deficiency of attention at the unique moment of stimulus change.

In this section nine experimental papers are presented, a selection chosen by both developmental psycholinguists and psychologists as being of special interest to the area of concept acquisition. Although many points (both theoretical and methodological) put the two fields of research in opposition, these papers show the possibilities of a coherent overview of development, covering both language and conceptual development. This is especially important in the overlapping areas of research concerning the sound–to–meaning mapping processes of lexical acquisition, and the appearance of words referring to mental verbs in the child’s vocabulary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young children sometimes attempt an action on an object, which is inappropriate because of the object size—they make scale errors. Existing theories suggest that scale errors may result from immaturities in children's action planning system, which might be overpowered by increased complexity of object representations or developing teleofunctional bias. We used computational modelling to emulate children's learning to associate objects with actions and to select appropriate actions, given object shape and size. A computational Developmental Deep Model of Action and Naming (DDMAN) was built on the dual‐route theory of action selection, in which actions on objects are selected via a direct (nonsemantic or visual) route or an indirect (semantic) route. As in case of children, DDMAN produced scale errors: the number of errors was high at the beginning of training and decreased linearly but did not disappear completely. Inspection of emerging object–action associations revealed that these were coarsely organized by shape, hence leading DDMAN to initially select actions based on shape rather than size. With experience, DDMAN gradually learned to use size in addition to shape when selecting actions. Overall, our simulations demonstrate that children's scale errors are a natural consequence of learning to associate objects with actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scale errors occur when young children seriously attempt to perform an action on an object which is impossible due to its size. Children vary substantially in the incidence of scale errors with many factors potentially contributing to these differences, such as age and the type of scale errors. In particular, the evidence for an inverted U‐shaped curve of scale errors involving the child's body (i.e., body scale errors), which would point to a developmental stage, is mixed. Here we re‐examine how body scale errors vary with age and explore the possibility that these errors would be related to the size and properties of children's lexicon. A large sample of children aged 18–30 months (N = 125) was tested in a scale error elicitation situation. Additionally, parental questionnaires were collected to assess children's receptive and expressive lexicon. Our key findings are that scale errors linearly decrease with age in childhood, and are more likely to be found in early talkers rather than in less advanced ones. This suggests that scale errors do not correspond to a developmental stage, and that one determinant of these errors is the speed of development of the linguistic and conceptual system, as a potential explanation for the individual variability in prevalence. Scale errors linearly decrease with age in childhood, and are more likely to be found in early talkers rather than in less advanced ones. This suggests that one determinant of these errors is the speed of development of the linguistic and conceptual system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]