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The inflectional diversity of parents' speech directed to children acquiring Dutch was investigated. Inflectional diversity is defined as the number of inflected forms of a particular lemma (e.g. singular, plural of a noun) and measured by means of Mean Size of Paradigm (MSP). Changes in the inflectional diversity of infant directed speech (IDS) were analyzed as a function of children's developing linguistic abilities. Two types of changes in the inflectional diversity of nouns and verbs were analyzed: (1) "coarse tuning": changes relative to children's growing vocabulary and (2) "fine lexical tuning": changes relative to children's use of specific lexical items. In addition, it was investigated if those changes were similar depending on particular characteristics of the children, namely, differences in their hearing abilities. Longitudinal recordings of spontaneous speech of 30 children (0;6-2;0) with normal hearing (NH) and 10 hearing-impaired children with a cochlear implant (CI) (0;6-2;6), and their parents were analyzed. As to coarse tuning, it was found that the inflectional diversity of IDS decreased at the beginning of the child's lexical development but increased again parallel to infants' growing cumulative vocabulary. As to fine lexical tuning, IDS showed less inflectional diversity before each child's first use of a word and gradually more inflectional diversity afterward. In addition, parents of children with CI used less inflectionally diverse speech than parents of children with NH, which suggests an adaptation to specific characteristics of the children. In conclusion, inflectional morphology in IDS appears to be tuned to children's hearing status and linguistic knowledge.

Speaking intelligibly is an important achievement in children's language development. How far do congenitally severe-to-profound hearing-impaired children who received a cochlear implant (CI) in the first two years of their life advance on the path to intelligibility in comparison to children with typical hearing (NH)? Spontaneous speech samples of children with CI and children with NH were orthographically transcribed by naïve transcribers. The entropy of the transcriptions was computed to analyze their degree of uniformity. The same samples were also rated on a continuous rating scale by another group of adult listeners. The transcriptions of the NH children's speech were more uniform, i.e., had significantly lower entropy, than those of the CI children, suggesting that the latter group displayed lower intelligibility. This was confirmed by the ratings on the continuous scale. Despite the relatively restricted age ranges, older children reached better intelligibility scores in both groups.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the perceptions and attitudes of such key stakeholders as students, parents, and teachers in Ontario's FSL program, and what potential impacts such attitudes could have on future participation in FSL learning in secondary schools in the province. It also examines some prevailing teaching and learning practices as they relate to the development of FSL programs in Ontario. More precisely, this article tries to answer the following three questions: How is Ontario's current FSL program perceived by some key stakeholders, what may influence these perceptions, and what are some of the possible implications for the future of FSL in Ontario, especially with respect to participation? Responses of students, parents, and teachers to questionnaires provided data for the paper. The fieldwork for this study was carried out in six secondary schools in three Ontario school boards, two of which were Catholic and the other, public.

Auditory brainstem implantation (ABI) is a recent innovation in pediatric hearing restoration in children with a sensorineural hearing impairment. Only limited information is available on the spontaneous speech development of severe-to-profound congenitally hearing-impaired children who received an ABI. The purpose of this study was to investigate longitudinally the accuracy of ABI children's word productions in spontaneous speech in comparison to the accuracy of children who received a cochlear implant and children with normal hearing. The data of this study consist of recordings of the spontaneous speech of the first three Dutch-speaking children living in Belgium who received an ABI. The children's utterances were phonemically transcribed and for each word, the distance between the child's production and the standard adult phonemic transcription was computed using the Levenshtein Distance as a metric. The same procedure was applied to the longitudinal data of the children with CI and the normally hearing children. The main result was that the Levenshtein Distance decreased in the three children with ABI but it remained significantly higher than that of children with typical hearing and cochlear implants matched on chronological age, hearing age, and lexicon size. In other words, the phonemic accuracy increased in the children with ABI but stayed well below that of children without hearing loss and children with cochlear implants. Moreover, the analyses revealed considerable individual variation between the children with ABI.

Do parents fine-tune the MLU of utterances with a particular word as the word is on the verge of appearing in the child's production? We analyzed a corpus of spontaneous interactions of 30 dyads. The children were in the initial stages of their lexical development, and the parents' utterances containing the words the children eventually acquired were selected. The main finding is that the MLU of the parental utterances containing the target words gradually decreased up to the point of the children's first production of those words. This suggests that parents fine-tune their utterances to support the children's linguistic development.

This study examined early Hebrew verb acquisition, highlighting CDS-CS relations across inflectional and derivational verb learning. It was carried out on a corpus of longitudinal dense dyadic interactions of two Hebrew-speaking toddlers aged 1;8-2;2 and their parents. Findings revealed correlated patterns within and between CDS and CS corpora in terms of verbs, structural root categories, and their components (roots, "binyan" conjugations, and derivational verb families), and clear relations between lexical-derivational development and inflectional growth in input-output relations, measured by MSP. It also showed that both corpora had few, yet highly semantically coherent, derivational families. Lexical learning in Hebrew was shown to be morphologically oriented, with both inflectional and derivational learning supporting and being supported by the development of the verb lexicon. These findings support findings in the general literature regarding the close relationship between parental input and child speech, and the affinity between lexical and grammatical growth.

In this study, results of computational simulations on Englishchild-directed speech are presented to uncover what distribu-tional properties of words make it easier to group them intolexical categories. This analysis provides evidence that wordsare easier to categorize when (i) they are hard to predict giventhe contexts they occur in; (ii) they occur in few different con-texts; and (iii) their contextual distributions have a low entropy,meaning that they tend to occur more often in one of the con-texts they occur in. This profile fits that of content words, espe-cially nouns and verbs, which is consistent with developmentalevidence showing that children learning English start by form-ing a noun and a verb category. These results further charac-terize the role of distributional information in lexical categoryacquisition and confirm that it is a robust, reliable, and devel-opmentally plausible source to learn lexical categories.

Previous studies have suggested that children possess cognitiverepresentations of multi-word units (MWUs) and that MWUscan facilitate the acquisition of smaller units contained withinthem. We propose that the formation of MWU representationsprecedes and facilitates the formation of single-word represen-tations in children. Using different computational methods,we extract MWUs from two large corpora of English child-directed speech. In subsequent regression analyses, we use ageof first production of individual words as the dependent and thenumber of MWUs within which each word appears as an in-dependent variable. We find that early-learned words appearwithin many MWUs – an effect which is neither reducible tofrequency or other common co-variates, nor to the number ofcontext words contained in the MWUs. Our findings supportaccounts wherein children acquire linguistic patterns of vary-ing sizes, moving gradually from the discovery of MWUs tothe acquisition of small-grained linguistic representations.

This study explores the use of F0, intensity and duration in the production of two types of prominences in French: primary accent with duration as the main acoustic cue, and secondary accent with F0 and intensity as acoustic cues. These parameters were studied in 13 children using a cochlear implant (CI) and 17 children with a normal hearing (NH), aged 5 to 10 years. Words were recorded in two different tasks, word-repetition and picture-naming, to compare repetition of an audio model with spontaneous production. NH children were able to produce both types of prominences with duration on the one hand and the combination of F0 and intensity on the other hand, similar to what is described in the literature in French-speaking adults. NH children have a more stable use of prominences than CI children, who demonstrate more variability across tasks, more even-timed duration patterns and less modulation of F0 and intensity at vowel and word level than their NH peers.

We test the predictions of different computational models ofcross-situational word learning that have been proposed in theliterature by comparing their behavior to that of young childrenand adults in the word learning task conducted by Ramscar,Dye, and Klein (2013). Our experimental results show that aHebbian learner and a model that relies on hypothesis testingfail to account for the behavioral data obtained from both pop-ulations. Ruling out such accounts might help reducing thesearch space and better focus on the most relevant aspects ofthe problem, in order to disentangle the mechanisms used dur-ing language acquisition to map words and referents in a highlynoisy environment.

This study investigates prosodic modulation in the spontaneous canonical babble of congenitally deaf infants with cochlear implants (CI) and normally hearing (NH) infants. Research has shown that the acoustic cues to prominence are less modulated in CI babble. However acoustic measurements of individual cues to prominence give incomplete information about prosodic modulation. In the present study, raters are asked to judge prominence since they simultaneously take into account all prosodic cues. Disyllabic utterances produced by CI and NH infants were presented to naive adult raters who had to indicate the degree and direction of prosodic modulation between syllables on a visual analogue scale. The results show that the babble of infants with CI is rated as having less prosodic modulation. Moreover, segmentally more variegated babble is rated as having more prosodic modulation. Raters do not perceive the babble to be predominantly trochaic, which indicates that the predominant stress pattern of Dutch is not yet apparent in the children's productions.

This study investigated the relation between lexical development and the production of prosodic prominence in disyllabic babble and words. Monthly recordings from nine typically developing Belgian-Dutch-speaking infants were analyzed from the onset of babbling until a cumulative vocabulary of 200 words was reached. The differentiation between the two syllables of isolated disyllabic utterances was computed for f0, intensity, and duration measurements. Results showed that the ambient trochaic pattern emerged in babble, but became enhanced in words. Words showed more prosodic differentiation in terms of f0 and intensity and a more even duration ratio. Age or vocabulary size did not predict the expansion of f0 or intensity in words, whereas vocabulary size was related to the production of more even-timed syllables. The findings are discussed in terms of lexicalist accounts of phonetic development and a potential phonetic highlighting function of first words.

In early word productions, the same types of errors are manifest in children with cochlear implants (CI) as in their normally hearing (NH) peers with respect to consonant clusters. However, the incidence of those types and their longitudinal development have not been examined or quantified in the literature thus far. Furthermore, studies on the spontaneous speech of Dutch-speaking children with CI are missing. This article compares children with CI and NH children with respect to their use of word-initial two-consonant clusters and the frequency of each type of error. The spontaneous speech of nine Dutch-speaking children with CI and an age-matched cohort of NH children was analysed from word-onset up to age seven. Results showed that accuracy and frequency of consonant clusters increases with age and that the age at implant activation is crucial in children with CI. Cross-sectional comparisons showed that some aspects of consonant cluster production in children with CI lag behind that of their NH peers, but that children with CI catch up by age five.

The frequency of occurrence of words and sounds has a pervasive influence on typically developing children's language acquisition. For instance, highly frequent words appear earliest in a child's lexicon, and highly frequent phonemes are produced more accurately. This study evaluates (a) whether word frequency influences word accuracy and (b) whether this is also the case for children with a history of auditory deprivation. More specifically, the influence of word frequency on phonemic accuracy is examined in deaf children with a cochlear implant (CI), and compared to age-matched children with typical hearing, between word onset and age 7. Results show that highly frequent words are produced more accurately, except for words in the highest frequency regions (i.e., predominantly closed-class words). This effect is more pronounced in children with typical hearing when compared with children with CI. Thus, children with CI are sensitive to word frequency, but to a lesser extent than peers with typical hearing.

Verb learning is an important part of linguistic acquisition. The present study examines the early phases of verb acquisition in Hebrew, a language with complex derivational and inflectional verb morphology, analyzing verbs in dense recordings of CDS and CS of two Hebrew-speaking parent-child dyads aged 1;8-2;2. The goal was to pinpoint those cues that help toddlers identify the root-and-pattern make-up of Hebrew verbs despite the prevalence of structural opacity and irregularity in the verbs they hear, due to a high token frequency of defective (irregular)-root verbs. The study provides a detailed account of the distribution of root types and temporal categories in Hebrew CDS and CS showing how verb specific morphological features in the form of inflectional affixes in the Modal Cluster of Infinitive Imperative and Future Tense in CDS act as distributional cues facilitating verb acquisition in CS.

This article investigates the amount of input and the quality of mother-child interactions in mothers who differ in socio-economic status (SES): mid-to-high SES (mhSES) and low SES. The amount of input was measured as the number of utterances per hour, the total duration of speech per hour and the number of turns per hour. The quality of the mother-child interactions was analysed using a simple coding scheme: (1) response or not?; (2) incorporation or not?; and (3) exact repetition or expansion? Main results showed that mothers of lowSES have fewer utterances per hour, shorter durations of speech and fewer turns per hour than mothers of mhSES. Also, lowSES mothers respond significantly less to their children's utterances and use more exact repetitions than expansions.

The aim of this study was to investigate the acoustic vowel space area in infant directed speech (IDS). The research question is whether the vowel space is expanded or remains constant in IDS. A corpus of spontaneous interactions of 9 dyads followed monthly from the age of 6 to 24 months was analyzed. The occurrences in the parents' speech of each word that the children eventually acquired were extracted. The surface of the vowel triangle and the convex hull of all vowels were computed. The main result is that the development of the vowel space in IDS follows an inverted U-shaped curve: the vowel space starts relatively small, gradually increases as the child's first word use approaches, and decreases again afterwards. These findings show that parents adapt their articulation to the evolving linguistic abilities of their child, and this adaptation can be detected at the level of individual lexical items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do children acquire rules for main stress assignment or do they learn stress in an exemplar-based way? In the language acquisition literature, the former approach has been advocated without exception: although they hear most words produced with their appropriate stress pattern, children are taken to extract rules and do not store stress patterns lexically. The evidence for a rule-based approach is investigated and it will be argued that in the literature this approach is preferred due to an extremely simplified interpretation of exemplar-based models. W e will report experiments showing that Instance-Based Learning, an exemplar-based model, makes the same kinds of stress related errors in production that children make: (i) the amount of production errors is related to metrical markedness, and (ii) stress shifts and errors with respect to the segmental and syllabic structure of words typically take the form of a regularization of stress patterns. InstanceBased Learning belongs to a class of Lazy Learning algorithms. In these algorithms, no explicit abstractions in the form of decision trees or rules are derived; abstraction is driven by similarity during performance. Our results indicate that at least for this domain, this kind of lazy learning is a valid alternative to rule-based learning. Moreover the results plead for a reanalysis of language acquisition data in terms of exemplar-based models.

This paper investigates the computationalgrounding of learning theories developedwithin a metrical phonology approach tostress assignment. In current researchthe Principles and Parameters approachto learning stress is pervasive. W e pointout some inherent problems associated withthis approach in leaxning the stress sys-tem of Dutch. T h e paper focuses on twospecific aspects of the learning task: w eempirically investigate the eflFect of inputencodings on learnability, and w e exam-ine the possibility of a data-oriented ap-proach as an alternative to the Principlesand Parameters approach. W e show thata data-oriented similarity-based machinelearning technique (Instance-Based Learn-ing), working on phonemic input encodingsis able to learn metrical phonology abstrac-tions based on concepts like syllable weight,and that in addition, it is able to extractgeneralizations which cannot be expressedwithin a metrical framework.

Consonant inventories are commonly drawn to assess the phonological acquisition of toddlers. However, the spontaneous speech data that are analysed often vary substantially in size and composition. Consequently, comparisons between children and across studies are fundamentally hampered. This study aims to examine the effect of sample size on the resulting consonant inventories. A spontaneous speech corpus of 30 Dutch-speaking 2-year-olds was used. The results indicate that in order to construct and compare inventories reliably, they should be drawn from speech samples that are equally large. A new consonant inventory procedure is introduced. The implementation of this procedure demonstrates considerably less variation in inventory size across children and word positions than reported previously. This finding has important implications for clinical studies that constructed and compared inventories of typically and atypically developing children without normalizing the sample size. (Contains 2 tables, 8 figures and 1 note.)

Recent neurobiological studies have advanced the hypothesis that language development is not continuously plastic but is governed by biological constraints that may be modified by experience within a particular time window. This hypothesis is tested based on spontaneous speech data from deaf cochlear-implanted (CI) children with access to linguistic stimuli at different developmental times. Language samples of nine children who received a CI between 5 and 19 months are analysed for linguistic measures representing different stages of language development. These include canonical babbling ratios, vocabulary diversity, and functional elements such as determiners. The results show that language development is positively related to the age at which children get first access to linguistic input and that later access to language is associated with a slower-than-normal language-learning rate. As such, the positive effect of early experience on the functional organisation of the brain in language processes is confirmed by behavioural performance. (Contains 2 footnotes, 2 tables, and 4 figures.)