The talk children hear from their primary caregivers predicts the size of their vocabularies. But children who spend time with multiple individuals also hear talk that others direct to them, as well as talk not directed to them at all. We investigated the effect of linguistic input on vocabulary acquisition in children who routinely spent time with one vs. multiple individuals. For all children...

We investigate implicit corrections in the form of contrastive discourse in childadult interaction, which have been argued to contribute to language learning. In contrast to previous work in psycholinguistics, we adopt a data-driven methodology, using comparably large amounts of data and leveraging computational methods. We conduct a corpus study on the use of parental corrective feedback and s...

OBJECTIVE To compare the fatal and non-fatal crash injury risk for children in minivans compared with midsize and large sport utility vehicles (SUVs). DESIGN Three large population-based sources of US crash data were used--a nationwide cohort of sampled police-reported crashes (NASS-CDS) along with a census of fatal crashes (FARS), plus a large child crash surveillance system, Partners for Ch...

OBJECTIVES This study examined the ability of prelingually deaf children with bilateral implants to identify emotion (i.e. happiness or sadness) in speech and music. METHODS Participants in Experiment 1 were 14 prelingually deaf children from 5-7 years of age who had bilateral implants and 18 normally hearing children from 4-6 years of age. They judged whether linguistically neutral utterance...

Previous studies have suggested that children and adults form cognitive representations of co-occurring word sequences. We propose (1) that the formation of such multi-word unit (MWU) representations precedes and facilitates the formation of single-word representations in children and thus benefits word learning, and (2) that MWU representations facilitate adult word recognition and thus benefi...

Abstract Parents often use partial self-repetitions with variation in successive utterances (e.g., Want to get your ball? Get Do you want ball?). Such ‘variation sets’ contain latent distributional information about the building blocks of language and are predictive children's lexical grammatical structures. Because these properties parents atypically developing children virtually unknown, we c...