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As individuals from different social groups come into contact, they must accommodate sociolinguistic differences in morphosyntax (e.g. He seem nice vs. He seems nice) in order to successfully represent and comprehend their interlocutor's speech. For example, speakers of Mainstream American English (MAE) and African American Language (AAL) can generally understand each other, but they speak differently in reliable ways. However, little is known about the mechanisms behind morphosyntactic accommodation. We hypothesize that listeners adjust their reliance on morphosyntactic cues based on their knowledge of their interlocutor's grammar. This knowledge varies in precision and accuracy based on an individual's linguistic experience. In a series of experiments, we will study participants' knowledge of both MAE and AAL, comparing monodialectal speakers of MAE to bidialectal speakers of AAL and MAE. To test listeners' implicit knowledge, we will use a sociolinguistic sentence repetition task. Listeners will transcribe sentences presented in both MAE and AAL (established through filler items associated with particular voices), where agreement morphology will be unclear in the auditory stimuli (e.g., The cat walk(s)so fast). We predict that listeners will be more likely to transcribe a nonmainstream form ("The cat walk so fast") when a sentence is presented in an AAL guise. To test listeners' explicit knowledge of variation in subject-verb agreement, we will play sample clips of MAE and AAL, then ask participants to rate how likely a speaker of each variety would be to say a given sentence.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) regularly use the base form of verbs (e.g., dance) instead of inflected forms (e.g., danced). We propose an account of this behavior in which children with DLD have difficulty processing novel inflected verbs in their input. This leads the inflected form to face stronger competition from alternatives. Competition is resolved by the production of a more accessible alternative with high semantic overlap with the inflected form: in English, the bare form. We test our account computationally by training a nonparametric Bayesian model that infers the productivity of the inflectional suffix (-ed). We systematically vary the number of novel types of inflected verbs in the input to simulate the input as processed by children with and without DLD. Modeling results are consistent with our hypothesis, suggesting that children’s inconsistent use of inflectional morphemes could stem from inferences they make on the basis of impoverished data.

Purpose: Children with cochlear implants (CIs) are more likely to struggle with spoken language than their age-matched peers with normal hearing (NH), and new language processing literature suggests that these challenges may be linked to delays in spoken word recognition. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether children with CIs use language knowledge via semantic prediction to facilitate recognition of upcoming words and help compensate for uncertainties in the acoustic signal.Method: Five- to 10-year-old children with CIs heard sentences with an informative verb (draws) or a neutral verb (gets) preceding a target word (picture). The target referent was presented on a screen, along with a phonologically similar competitor (pickle). Children’s eye gaze was recorded to quantify efficiency of access of the target word and suppression of phonological competition. Performance was compared to both an age-matched group and vocabulary-matched group of children with NH.Results: Children with CIs, like their peers with NH, demonstrated use of informative verbs to look more quickly to the target word and look less to the phonological competitor. However, children with CIs demonstrated less efficient use of semantic cues relative to their peers with NH, even when matched for vocabulary ability.Conclusions: Children with CIs use semantic prediction to facilitate spoken word recognition but do so to a lesser extent than children with NH. Children with CIs experience challenges in predictive spoken language processing above and beyond limitations from delayed vocabulary development. Children with CIs with better vocabulary ability demonstrate more efficient use of lexical-semantic cues. Clinical interventions focusing on building knowledge of words and their associations may support efficiency of spoken language processing for children with CIs.Supplemental Material S1. Detailed information regarding stimuli.Blomquist, C., Newman, R. S., Huang, Y. T., & Edwards, J. (2021). Children with cochlear implants use semantic prediction to facilitate spoken word recognition. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1044/2021_JSLHR-20-00319

Supplemental material, Appendices for Cross-Linguistic Perceptual Categorization of the Three Corner Vowels: Effects of Listener Language and Talker Age by Hyunju Chung, Benjamin Munson and Jan Edwards in Language and Speech

Speech produced by children is characterized by a high fundamental frequency which complicates measurement of vocal tract resonances, and hence coarticulation. Here two whole-spectrum measures of coarticulation are validated, one temporal and one spectral, that are less sensitive to these challenges. Using these measures, consonant-vowel coarticulation is calculated in the speech of a large sample of 4-year-old children. The measurements replicate known lingual coarticulatory findings from the literature, demonstrating the utility of these acoustic measures of coarticulation in speakers of all ages.

Lexical comprehension is commonly measured by parent report, but it may be difficult for parents of children with ASD to accurately judge their child's comprehension. We compared parent report to an eye-gaze measure of lexical comprehension in which participants observed pairs of images on a screen, along with accompanying speech that named one of the two images. Twenty-two toddlers with ASD participated. Trials were included if the target word was reported as unknown. Children spent significantly more time looking at the target after it was named than before (d = 0.66). These results provide evidence that eye-gaze measures can reveal emerging lexical knowledge in young children with ASD that may otherwise be overlooked.

International audience; Phonological development is often described as reflecting "markedness" constraints. For instance, Jakobson (1939) suggests that mastery of the contrast between [grave] labials and [acute] coronals necessarily precedes the more "marked" contrast between [diffuse] dentals and [compact] dorsals. Jakobson's claim is corroborated in Locke's (1983) review of studies of children acquiring English and several other languages, showing more accurate production of [t] relative to [k]. The general idea that speech production and processing universals determine the course of phonological development is developed also by Lindblom (1980), Davis et al. (2002), Wauquier and Yamaguchi (2011), among others. Cross-sectional studies of children acquiring Greek (Nicolaidis et al. 2003), Japanese (Beckman, Yoneyama & Edwards 2003), and Drehu or French (Monnin & Lœvenbruck 2010), by contrast, suggest that any tendency to produce coronals more accurately than dorsals is modulated by language-specific frequencies. In Drehu and French, the highly frequent [k] is slightly more accurate than [t]; in Drehu, the frequent [g], is much more accurate than the rare [d]. It might be argued that this modulation is not due to consonant frequency per se but is related to universal "fronted frames" versus "backed frames" (Davis et al. 2002). To disentangle markedness from language-specific constraints, the present study examines Drehu and French data on [k] and [t] in different vowel contexts.

International audience; Age-typical misarticulations in phonological development that are attested in any given language might be explained by universal "markedness constraints" or by language-specific "phonotactic constraints". The present study examines Drehu (an Austronesian language spoken in New Caledonia) and French developmental data on [k] and [t] in different vowel contexts. The study of growth in accuracy by age for word-initial [k] and [t] in 3 vowel contexts shows that both stops are mastered early in both languages, but [k] is somewhat more accurate for the youngest children. In addition, the difference in accuracy is modulated by vowel context. The greater accuracy of [k] before [u] in Drehu is in keeping with the intrinsic difficulty of producing coronal constrictions before back vowels described in the frame/content account of markedness universals based on the mandibular cycle. The greater accuracy of [k] before [i] in French, on the other hand, is unexpected. The relationship between mean accuracy of [k] or [t] and CV frequencies derived from two corpora of child-directed speech was examined for the youngest children. The otherwise puzzling effects of the front-vowel context on accuracy of [t] seem to reflect the very low frequency of the [ti] sequence in both languages. The relative accuracy of [t] and [k] in development reflects the markedness of particular combinations of lingual stop and coarticulated vowel, as modulated by language-specific phonotactics.

How do infants use their knowledge of native language sound patterns when learning words? There is ample evidence of infants' precocious acquisition of native language sound structure during the first years of life, but much less evidence concerning how they apply this knowledge to the task of associating sounds with meanings in word learning. To address this question, 18-month-olds were presented with two phonotactically legal object labels (containing sound sequences that occur frequently in English) or two phonotactically illegal object labels (containing sound sequences that never occur in English), paired with novel objects. Infants were then tested using a looking-while-listening measure. The results revealed that infants looked at the correct objects after hearing the legal labels, but not the illegal labels. Furthermore, vocabulary size was related to performance. Infants with larger receptive vocabularies displayed greater differences between learning of legal and illegal labels than infants with smaller vocabularies. These findings provide evidence that infants' knowledge of native language sound patterns influences their word learning.

Refereed/Peer-reviewed