These findings suggest that VSL may have both domain-general and domain-specific associations with language learning. “
“Recent work has shown that young children can use fine phonetic detail during the recognition of isolated and sentence-final words from early in lexical development. The present study investigates 24-month-olds’ word recognition in sentence-medial position in two experiments using an Intermodal Preferential Looking paradigm. In Experiment 1, French toddlers detect word-final voicing mispronunciations (e.g., buz [byz] for bus [bys] “bus”), and they compensate for native voicing assimilations (e.g., buz devant toi [buzdəvɑ̃twa] “bus in front of you”) in the

middle of sentences. Similarly, English toddlers detect word-final voicing mispronunciations (e.g., sheeb for sheep) in Talazoparib clinical trial Experiment 2, but they do not compensate for illicit voicing assimilations (e.g., sheeb there). Thus, French and English 24-month-olds can take into account fine phonetic detail even if words are presented

in the middle of sentences, and French toddlers show language-specific compensation abilities for pronunciation variation caused by native voicing assimilation. “
“Infants start pointing systematically to objects or events around their first birthday. It has been proposed that infants point to an event to share their selleck kinase inhibitor appreciation of it with others. In this study, we tested another hypothesis, according to which infants’ pointing could also serve as an epistemic request directed to the adult. Thus, infants’ Amylase motivation for pointing could include the expectation that adults would provide new information about the referent. In two experiments, an adult reacted to 12-month-olds’ pointing gestures by exhibiting “Informing” or “Sharing” behavior. In response, infants

pointed more frequently across trials in the Informing than in the Sharing condition. This suggests that the feedback that contained new information matched infants’ expectations more than mere attention sharing. Such a result is consistent with the idea that not just the comprehension but also the production of early communicative signals is tuned to assist infants’ learning from others. “
“Non-verbal referential communication is impaired in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, the development of difficulties with referential communication in the younger siblings of children with ASD (High-Risk Siblings)—and the degree to which early referential communication predicts later autism symptomatology—is not clear. We modeled the early developmental trajectories of three types of referential communication: responding to joint attention (RJA), initiating joint attention (IJA), and initiating behavioral requests (IBR) across 8, 10, 12, 15, and 18 months of age in High-Risk Siblings (n = 40) and the infant siblings of children without ASD (Low-Risk Siblings; n = 21).