\n
This study investigated the relation between the home literacy environment (HLE) and phonological and semantic functional specialization in 5-6- (N=33) and 7-8-year-old children (N=76). Phonological and semantic processing are critical components of language comprehension. Phonological and semantic specialization have been established for 5-8-year-old children. Prior studies indicate HLE relates to language processing behaviorally and in the brain. Although HLE is related to brain activation during language tasks, whether HLE supports phonological and semantic specialization remains unknown. This study used fMRI sound and meaning judgment tasks. Results suggest a relation between HLE \u2013 measured as frequency of family-to-child reading \u2013 and phonological specialization in 5-6-year-olds in left superior temporal gyrus (STG), and semantic specialization in 7-8-year-olds in left STG, left middle temporal gyrus (MTG), and left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Additionally, within-task analyses revealed relations between HLE and phonological processing in 5-6-year-olds (in STG) and semantic processing in 7-8-year-olds (in MTG).<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n
\n What is the Baby \u201c<\/span>Saying\u201d? Adults’ Interpretation of Infants’ Pointing Gestures.<\/p>\nRan Wei, Ulf Liszkowski, Paul Harris and Meredith Rowe<\/em><\/h6>\n Across cultural contexts, infants’ pointing gestures are foundational to the development of intentional and adaptable communication. Previous research has proposed that early pointing gestures may convey requestive, expressive, informative, and interrogative intents. Nevertheless, it remains unknown how adults interpret infants’ intents conveyed through pointing gestures. We adopted the Human Simulation Paradigm to measure adults’ interpretations of video clips of infants’ pointing gestures through an online survey. Through three studies with adult students in the U.S., American parents, and German parents, we ask whether adults’ interpretation of infants’ index-finger pointing gestures aligns with the taxonomy in the current literature, and whether these interpretations differ according to cultural backgrounds and experience caring for infants. Results suggest adults reliably interpreted infants’ “correct” intents expressed via the prototypical pointing gestures regardless of their experience caring for infants or their cultural background suggesting that the capability to interpret pointing gestures may be a universal aptitude.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n \n Switching the Majority Language: The case of Heritage Greek in North and South America.<\/p>\n Evangelia Daskalaki, Aretousa Giannakou, Christina Haska and Vicky Chondrogianni<\/em><\/h6>\n This study examined the acquisition of Greek under the influence of Spanish and English. In particular, we focused on vocabulary and grammar and collected data from (i) a group of Greek-Spanish bilingual children who speak Greek as an HL in South America (SA), and (ii) a group of Greek-English bilingual children who speak Greek as an HL in North America (NA). The two groups differed in their amount of Greek exposure (SA<NA) but were matched on age and HL proficiency. They were administered a picture-naming task targeting vocabulary (that included both cognates and non-cognates), and two sentence completion tasks that targeted the form and placement of referential expressions. We found facilitatory effects when Spanish was the ML across all domains except the domain of null subjects and object clitics. This finding supports the conclusion that the typological proximity with the ML may boost heritage children’s performance, even under reduced input.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n| 9:30 – 10:00<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| \n The Changing Roles of the Language and Attention Systems in Statistical Learning Across Development.<\/p>\n Anqi Hu, Katherine Trice, Pradyumna Lanka and Zhenghan Qi<\/em><\/h6>\n Children learn languages more successfully than adults. However, the mechanisms underlying children’s language learning advantage remain under investigated. Statistical learning (SL) is a fundamental building block for language development. Understanding SL mechanisms across development may explain why children learn languages better than adults. This study thus examined the neurodevelopmental changes of SL in the language and attention networks, which undergo significant changes across development. Forty adults and twenty-eight 5-to-12-year-old children completed a Syllable SL task in the scanner, where they listened to a structured syllable sequence containing triplet patterns and a random syllable sequence. Children’s language and attention networks showed greater sensitivity to linguistic patterns than adults. The plasticity of the language network emerged earlier in children than adults. Children also showed a greater decouplng between networks than adults during the later stage of learning. Future research should explore if children’s enhanced short-term functional plasticity leads to better language outcomes.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n \n Connections between real-time point comprehension and overall gesture and word knowledge in infancy.<\/p>\n Lillianna Righter and Elika Bergelson<\/em><\/h6>\n Early gestures like pointing have well-established, robust links with early language. We ask whether improvements in point comprehension around age 1 relate to early receptive and productive vocabulary, and gesture vocabulary, within infants, using a box search task (Behne et al, 2012) and the English Words and Gestures CDI. In a sample of 37 infants, we find robust positive relationships between point comprehension performance and each of three factors: age, productive vocabulary, and gesture use. We replicate prior work on pointing and set groundwork for examining an ordered relationship between the onset of point comprehension and vocabulary growth.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n \n Comprehension and production of which-questions in child heritage speakers of Romanian: The role of DOM and number agreement.<\/p>\n Anamaria Bentea and Theodoros Marinis<\/em><\/h6>\n This study compares the comprehension and production of Romanian subject and object which-questions in child heritage speakers and monolingually-raised children and aims to understand whether a. morphosyntactic cues like Differential Object Marking\/DOM and number agreement guide online interpretation in heritage language\/HL and monolingually-raised children and b. whether HL children use these cues in their production. The results of a visual-world eye-tracking task showed similar processing patterns in monolinguals and HL children for subject questions, which overall displayed more looks to Target images than object questions. The data also revealed a higher proportion of looks to Target in object-questions with number mismatch than in questions with number match, but only in the monolingual group. The results of an elicited production task indicate that monolingual children produce significantly more target subject and object which-questions than HL children, but number mismatch does not enhance which-question production in either group.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n| 10:00 – 10:30<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| \n Receptive language development in children born to mothers with gestational diabetes mellitus.<\/p>\n Jennifer R. Barbosa, Lauren C. Shuffrey, William P. Fifer and Laura Lakusta<\/em><\/h6>\n Although research has progressed in understanding the components of language, the neurobiology of language is still not well understood. Our study explores children exposed to Gestational Diabetes Mellitus (GDM), aiming to understand the relationship between receptive language components and neural processes. GDM, affecting about 10% of pregnancies in the US, alters the in-utero environment and can lead to neurodevelopmental changes relevant to language development. Previous studies have shown mixed results regarding the impact of GDM on language (Dionne et al., 2008; Krakowiak et al., 2012). To address this, we conducted a study with 32 children, assessing receptive language using the QUILS\/QUILS:ES via Zoom. Hierarchical linear regressions, controlling for sex and age, found no significant differences in receptive language between GDM-exposed children and controls. These findings suggest that receptive language may be preserved in GDM-exposed children, warranting further research into the underlying neurobiological pathways.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n \n Language Input in the Amazonian Indigenous Context: A case study from Pan\u00e3ra.<\/p>\n Jessamine Jeter, Naja Ferjan Ramirez and Myriam Lapierre<\/em><\/h6>\n While existing language acquisition research suggests that child-directed speech (CDS) is an ideal type of input for children, this work largely focuses on children in Western settings where CDS is the cultural norm (e.g. ManyBabies Consortium, 2020). Pan\u00e3ra cultural practices differ greatly from those in Western societies: Pan\u00e3ra society is not child-centered, and qualitative ethnographic reports suggest CDS infrequent (Ewart, 2008). This is the first quantitative study of the Pan\u00e3ra linguistic environment. We collected and analyzed 13 day-long recordings of Pan\u00e3ra infants. Data suggests that Pan\u00e3ra infants spend the bulk of their day with multiple adults, as opposed to being in one-on-one interactions, as is common for Western children. Additionally more than half of Pan\u00e3ra infants’ language input comes from other-directed vocalizations (ODV), rather than CDS. Taken together, these results suggest that Pan\u00e3ra children may learn to \u2018tune in’ to ODV to extract the necessary linguistic information.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n \n Heritage speakers’ perceptual phonological advantage over non-native listeners is not a universal phenomenon.<\/p>\n Matthew Ayobami Ajibade<\/em><\/h6>\n Heritage speakers are often recognized for their phonological advantage over adult non-native listeners. To further explore this well-known phenomenon, we conducted a study on the perceptual discrimination of Yoruba place of articulation and voicing contrasts in labial-velar, labial, and velar stops. Participants included native Yoruba (NY) speakers, heritage Yoruba (HY) speakers, and na\u00efve listeners (NL). Our findings revealed varying levels of performance across these groups, depending on the specific contrasts. Although all three groups effectively discriminated most contrasts, the results from the labial-velar versus labial contrast and the voicing contrast in labial-velar were particularly noteworthy. In the voicing contrasts, HY speakers demonstrated an advantage over NL. However, in the labial-velar versus labial contrast, the performance of both groups was comparable. These results challenge the belief in a universal phonological advantage for heritage speakers over non-native listeners, suggesting that such advantages may be contrast-dependent and not universally applicable.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n\n| 10:30 \u2013 11:00<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \nBREAK
\n<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n| Session A<\/p>\n East Balcony<\/span><\/p>\n<\/td>\n | Session B<\/p>\n Conference Auditorium<\/span><\/td>\n | Session C<\/p>\n Terrace Lounge<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \nLanguage input<\/strong><\/td>\nBlind \/ low-vision populations<\/strong><\/td>\nSyntax<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| 11:00 – 11:30<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| \n Validity of a gamified statistical learning task as a measure of childrens’ real-world language learning.<\/p>\n Brynn Siles, Anqi Hu, Kelly Chan, Anna Ciriello, Morten H. Christiansen and Zhenghan Qi<\/em><\/h6>\n It is not clear whether the artificial language learning paradigms in traditional statistical learning (SL) tasks relate to childrens’ real-world language learning capabilities. The current study investigates the relationship between a statistical learning task and a phonemic serial recall (PSRT) task designed to reflect children’s sensitivity to natural statistical patterns in language inputs. In the SL task, children were exposed to a stream of speech syllables with embedded triplets, then asked to repeat sequences containing familiar or unfamiliar triplets. In the PSRT task, children were asked to repeat sequences made up of high-frequency or low-frequency bi-syllable combinations, based on the CHILDES database. The difference score for the average number of correct syllables for SICR ((familiar – foil)\/(familiar + foil)) and PSRT ((high-frequency – low-frequency)\/(high-frequency + low-frequency)) were significantly correlated (R = 0.31, p = 0.0072). This provides a mechanistic link between childrens’ statistical learning tasks and real-world language learning capabilities.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n \n Examining early speech production in blind and sighted infants: babbling, words, and repetitions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Eugenia Lukin and Elika Bergelson<\/em><\/h6>\n Congenitally blind infants show a delay in early vocabulary production, but analogous language skills in adulthood. We investigated blind infants’ earliest productions relative to age-matched sighted peers. In a corpus of daylong recordings (n=16\/group), we classified vocalizations as noncanonical babbling, canonical babbling, single-word utterances, and multi-word utterances. Words were further classified into exact repetitions, partial repetitions, and nonrepetitions. Repetitions were also tagged for pragmatic functions. We found that blind infants produce fewer vocalizations than their sighted peers of all types, and a significantly lower proportion of canonical babble. We further found that blind infants’ produced exact repetitions relatively more often than sighted peers, and half as many self-repetitions. Implications for early language learning mechanisms and trajectories in the context of sensory differences are discussed.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n \n Elided questions in child Spanish: Where do prepositions go?<\/p>\n Victoria Mateu and Nina Hyams<\/em><\/h6>\n Spanish prepositions can be omitted under sluicing, challenging the P-Stranding Generalization. Several analyses have been proposed \u2013the ellipsis site (i) involves no movement, (ii) is reanalyzed as a cleft to avoid a violation, (iii) is isomorphic, P-stranding violations are repaired. Given children\u2019s well-known subject>object asymmetry in wh-questions, the latter two analyses predict a subject sluice advantage. Moreover, if omitted P sluices involve reanalysis, children should perform better when the P is explicit.
\nOur corpus study shows children produce relatively fewer object sluices than subject sluices compared to adults. Moreover, both children and adults produce sluices with omitted prepositions at similar rates.
\nAn experimental study with children aged 3-6 tested sluices and cleft questions. We replicated previous findings showing a subject advantage for both structures, supporting a movement analysis for Spanish sluices as well. Crucially, no difference was found between omitted and explicit P sluices, suggesting both involve similar derivations.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n| 11:30 – 12:00<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| \n Getting the message across: Acoustic realization of information in maternal child-directed speech.<\/p>\n Bhuvana Narasimhan, Rebecca Scarborough, Allison Hilger, Kanupriya Kale, Justin Bai, Chloe Circenis, Tessa Moskoff, Zohar Naaman and Conner Moses<\/em><\/h6>\n Child-directed speech (CDS) differs from adult-directed speech (ADS) in its acoustic features (e.g., pitch modulations, lengthened and hyperarticulated speech sounds) which regulate arousal and attention, help children interpret emotional signals, and highlight linguistic units that facilitate language learning. That is, they produce affective or pedagogical benefits. However, caregivers may also adjust their speech for informational reasons, to increase the salience of difficult-to-process message elements. We investigated how caregivers, specifically mothers, adjusted speech to children versus adults when conveying messages varying in difficulty. Findings show that mothers increased vowel duration when conveying difficult-to-process (corrective) information to children versus adults, supporting an informational motivation for speech modifications in CDS. But pitch is only influenced by listener type, thus not all acoustic features serve to improve message intelligibility. By simultaneously examining listener- and message-driven effects, our study extends understanding of the communicative and cognitive factors motivating acoustic variation in maternal speech.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n \n Lexical Tone Sensitivity in Blind, Non-Tone Language Speakers.<\/p>\n Nancy Eng, Stanley Chen, Lauren Levy and Zarina Rakhmanova<\/em><\/h6>\n Ability of blind, non-tone language speakers to attend to lexical tone was evaluated. Previous studies have they superior auditory processing skills and enhanced verbal memory, outperforming sighted people on pitch discrimination, phoneme identification, rapid speech processing, and recall of letter and word sequences. Thus, we hypothesized that English-speaking, blind people are more sensitive than their sighted counterparts in using pitch contours for lexical access. Twelve monolingual English speakers without any exposure to tone languages, participated in this study. Six blind and six sighted speakers participated on word learning and sentence verification tasks to access attention to lexical tone. Results revealed that blind participants were significantly more to lexical tones than their sighted counterparts. Additionally, the blind group’s response accuracy gradually increased over time for the blind group but not for the sighted group. Findings suggest that sensory compensation may extend to the processing and learning of unfamiliar linguistic features.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n \n Attention influences children’s order of mention in conjoined noun phrases but not in transitive sentences.<\/p>\n Sarah Dolscheid and Martina Penke (presented remotely)<\/em><\/h6>\n There are close links between the allocation of attention and language production in adult speakers. However, the same is unknown for children. To address this open issue, we tested 4- to 5-year-old German-speaking children in two picture description tasks using eye tracking: a noun pair naming task and a picture-based event description task. We manipulated children’s attention by means of a brief cue presented in the place where the left character\/the patient was about to appear. In both tasks, visual cueing was highly effective in modulating children’s attention. However, while attentional orienting affected children’s order of mention during the production of simple conjoined noun phrases, the same did not apply to the production of event descriptions that require the production of more complex syntactic structures such as passives. Taken together, effects of attention differed depending on syntactic complexity, hence demonstrating a complex interrelationship between attention and language production in children.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n| 12:00 – 12:30<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| \n Perception precedes production past preschool, but children may learn the uncertainty of their own speech sounds.<\/p>\n Sarah Creel, Anges Vu and Kristie McCrary Kambourakis (presented remotely)<\/em><\/h6>\n A persistent puzzle in child language acquisition is how much a child’s production reflects their perception. In infancy, perception far exceeds production: infants distinguish speech sounds they cannot yet produce. What of older children? We recorded 72 3-5-year-oldsnaming 24 pictures aloud, either before or after an experimenter named the same pictures. Then the child heard each recorded name played back (e.g. “wun”) as four pictures appeared (run, one, ship, chip). They pointed to the picture they thought had been named as eye movements to pictures were tracked. At least for the sounds tested, young children’s perception of their own speech was less accurate than adults’ speech by about 13%. This is consistent with a Perceptual-Precedence Hypothesis. However, they appear less sure of their own accurate productions when those productions could be a different sound, supporting the Multiple Representations Hypothesis. Children may perceptually learn childlike speech patterns, possibly their own.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n \n Differential effects of syntactic complexity in congenitally blind and sighted individuals: evidence from self-paced listening and reading.<\/p>\n Emily Silvano, Ziqi Chen, Zaida McClinton and Marina Bedny<\/em><\/h6>\n This study examines how sensory experience influences language processing in people born blind. Unlike sighted individuals, who use visual cues and prosody to understand sentences complex sentences as garden path sentences, blind participants rely more on prosody. To investigate whether the advantage blind individuals have in processing garden path sentences is due to their heightened sensitivity to prosody, we conducted an experiment where prosody was removed from a listening experiment and a reading experiment was added. 23 blind and 22 sighted participants took part in self-paced listening and reading experiments. Results indicated that, without prosody, blind participants had a greater GP cost in spoken sentence comprehension but not in reading. This suggests that blind individuals heavily depend on prosody cues. Future research will further explore the role of prosody in language processing for blind individuals. These findings support the hypothesis that lack of visual referential cues enhances sensitivity to prosody.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n \n Clitics as prerequisites for Spanish DOM.<\/p>\n Penelope Daniel<\/em><\/h6>\n Spanish has a well-known differential argument marking (DOM) pattern, where only animate, specific objects receive the case-marker a. Torrego (1998) argues that Spanish DOM involves a form of object shift, which raises specific objects into a position with special semantic and case-marking properties. Schaeffer (1997), building on Sportiche (1996), similarly argues that object shift in Dutch raises specific objects to the same position where object clitics are base-generated. I investigate whether Spanish DOM is connected to the Spanish clitic system: if languages differ in whether they provide this special clitic position, is its presence a ‘prerequisite’ for DOM in Spanish? If so, we may expect children to acquire clitics at least as early as DOM. I investigated longitudinal corpus data of 10 native Spanish-speaking children. There was a significant positive correlation between the acquisition of clitics and DOM, as well as a significant ordering effect, with children acquiring clitics first.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n\n\n| 12:30 \u2013 2:00<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \nLUNCH BREAK
\n+
\nNIH\/NSF FUNDING SYMPOSIUM (CONFERENCE AUDITORIUM)<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n \n\n\n| Session A<\/p>\n East Balcony<\/span><\/p>\n<\/td>\n | Session B<\/p>\n Conference Auditorium<\/span><\/td>\n | Session C<\/p>\n Terrace Lounge<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \nInfant-directed speech<\/strong><\/td>\nUnderstanding events<\/strong><\/td>\nSemantics<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| 2:00 – 2:30<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| \n Infant’s preference for and comprehension of child-produced speech.<\/p>\n Federica Bulgarelli<\/em><\/h6>\n Infants’ language development is tied to their linguistic experiences, but most of this research has focused on what infants hear from adult caregivers and how infants understand words produced by adults. However, children do not exclusively interact with adults, and speech from other children could influence learning. We ask if 9-14-month-olds 1) exhibit a preference for child-produced vs. adult-produced speech and 2) whether child-produced speech is harder to comprehend. Participants did not exhibit a preference for listening to adult- or child-produced speech in the preference task. In the comprehension task, younger infants (9-11-month-olds) did not exhibit above chance word comprehension. Older infants (12-14-month-olds) exhibited above chance word comprehension during the target window (367-2000ms post target word onset), but participants without older siblings exhibited better comprehension for adult-produced speech compared to child-produced speech. While infants do not prefer listening to child- or adult-produced speech, real-world experience influences processing of child-produced speech.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n \n The role of language in building one and two-place predicates: event imitation in homesigners.<\/p>\n Irene Canudas Grabolosa, Madeline Quam, Marie Coppola, Jesse C. Snedeker and Annemarie Kocab<\/em><\/h6>\n A key question in developmental psychology and linguistics is whether language merely expresses pre-existing concepts or provides new cognitive tools. De Villiers and colleagues suggest that abstract transitive relationships can only be reliably encoded via language, supporting this claim with evidence that infants and adults struggle with transitive role differentiation without language. This study examines adult Nicaraguan homesigners, an ideal case study because they lack conventional language but create personal communication systems. Homesigners and English-speaking five-year-olds were tested in an imitation task, revealing that both groups could accurately encode transitive relationships, with no significant differences between groups or event types. In the critical two-participant condition, performance was well above chance for both groups. These results suggest that the ability to encode and generalize transitive relationships exists independently of conventional language.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n \n Highlighting the presupposition trigger helps: Evidence from Mandarin-acquiring children’s interpretation of presuppositional you ‘again’.<\/p>\n Ting Xu, Lyn Tieu and Stella Christie<\/em><\/h6>\n Previous studies of the presupposition trigger \u2018again’ have used the Truth Value Judgment Task, reporting successful acquisition by preschoolers. Yet these studies also excluded a number of child participants who responded as though they had ignored the trigger. A recent study with Mandarin-acquiring children used a Question Answer Task and found that the majority answered the questions as if ignoring the trigger \u2018you’ (\u2018again’). In the current study, 52 Mandarin-speaking children (4;01\u20145;12; M=4;10) and 33 adult controls participated in a Felicity Judgment Task. They listened to stories and judged which of two characters answered better after each story. Results showed children successfully understood the presuppositional trigger (albeit not at fully adult-like levels). We discuss why children might have failed to exhibit sensitivity to \u2018you’ (\u2018again’) in previous tasks, considering the salience of the presupposition and potential differences in children’s and adults’ ability to locally accommodate presuppositions.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n| 2:30 – 3:00<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| \n Consonants of infant-directed speech are hardly more intelligible than consonants of adult-directed speech, and what this implies for infant word segmentation models.<\/p>\n Daniel Swingley<\/em><\/h6>\n Infant-directed speech is sometimes argued to be phonetically clearer than adult-directed speech. Maybe, but how clear is it? In several experiments, we asked native English speakers to identify the consonants in about 3600 VCV clips extracted from word onsets or offsets of IDS (Brent corpus) or ADS (Buckeye), under various conditions. Coda consonants were no clearer in IDS than ADS, with fewer than \u00bc identified better than 50% of the time. Onset consonants were slightly clearer in IDS (60% correct) than ADS (50% correct). The task was feasible (many consonants were correctly categorized) but even in IDS, most consonants were not reliably identifiable, even in full sentence contexts low-pass-filtered to restrict access to the lexicon (Expt. 2). I will argue that computational-modeling approaches should not assume that infant word segmentation operates over strings of correctly identified phonetic categories, and will discuss some surprising patterns in the results.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n \n American Sign Language transitive sentence comprehension strategies by deaf English-ASL bilinguals: the role of early language environment.<\/p>\n Qi Cheng<\/em><\/h6>\n Most deaf individuals in the U.S. are English-ASL bilinguals with vastly different early language environments. This study examined the role of early language environment (native, early ASL, early Manually Coded English, early Oral) on ASL sentence comprehension strategies among deaf adults using bilingual proficiency tests and an ASL sentence-picture matching task. Our findings suggest that some non-native signers without early ASL exposure show less robust use of ASL word order and overall low bilingual proficiency. These findings indicate that early MCE signing and oral experience may not provide sufficient language input to support a robust first language foundation for ASL syntactic development.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n \n Children’s acquisition of Hindi kinship terms: A study of partial word knowledge.<\/p>\n Nina Schoener and Mahesh Srinivasan<\/em><\/h6>\n Although some words can be rapidly learned, others exhibit a protracted trajectory, in which a child’s initial production of a word can precede their full, adult-like understanding by months or years. The present studies probe the developmental trajectory of Hindi kinship terms which are relational, abstract, and semantically complex. Across two studies, we examined full and partial knowledge of kinship terms among Hindi-speaking children. We found that kinship terms that integrate more semantic features have a longer learning trajectory, and that semantic features which are more perceptually-available, like gender, are included in children’s representations earlier than more abstract features like lineage and consanguinity. We also found that children’s kinship-term definitions initially rely on stereotypical characteristics of individuals rather than familial relations (in line with a characteristic-to-defining shift). Together, these studies demonstrate how investigating children’s partial knowledge of difficult words can illuminate the developmental processes through which such words are acquired.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n| 3:00 – 3:30<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| \n An acoustic study of pitch features of infant- and adult-directed speech in first and second languages.<\/p>\n Fenqi Wang, Andrew Cheng, Farzana Ali, Antonius Tam and Henny Yeung<\/em><\/h6>\n This study examines pitch features in infant- and adult-directed speech (IDS\/ADS) among bilingual caregivers speaking Cantonese (L1) and English (L2) in Anglophone Canada. Data from seven families with 14 caregivers were analyzed using LENA recordings. A Praat script extracted pitch features from 4,921 audio clips, which were then analyzed using linear mixed-effects regression models. Results showed that for mothers, pitch was higher in IDS regardless of language, while for fathers, pitch was lower overall in L2. There were no interactions between register and language for either group. Additionally, mothers showed no significant difference in pitch variation, whereas fathers exhibited less pitch variation in IDS compared to ADS. These findings highlight distinct pitch patterns in IDS and ADS among bilingual parents and suggest cultural variations in pitch use within multilingual families.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n \n Failures Succeed in Affirming Negation: Event perception and negator learning.<\/p>\n Victor Gomes, Yubin Huh, Heesu Yun and John Trueswell<\/em><\/h6>\n Truth-functional negation poses remarkable challenges to accounts of word learning. When someone utters, “It is not raining,” what information is available from observing the world that leads to such a thought? Whenever it is not raining, the weather is any number of other things (e.g., sunny, snowing), and these are presumably much more available immediately. If early language learners are limited in their inferential abilities and knowledge about the world, it’s unclear how they could learn what “not” means from such cases. We propose that event perception can spontaneously provide a construal of an event to an observer before it is completed, and thus cases of failure could provide strong and reliable evidence of a negative construals through development. When failures are commented upon, they may therefore serve as ideal negator-learning contexts. Our theory was supported by production data showing both children and adults reliable describe failures with negation.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n \n Overcoming performance issues: Children respect presuppositions of \u00a0\u201cthe\u201d-expressions.<\/p>\n Yuanfan Ying, Alexander Williams, Valentine Hacquard and Jeffrey Lidz<\/em><\/h6>\n Elicited production studies have suggested that children up to the age of 5 sometimes use singular “the”-expressions in non-adult-like ways, i.e., when the referent is not familiar to interlocutors or not unique in the domain. However, unnatural settings in prior studies may be responsible for children’s production errors. We present a new elicitation-through-conversation study that creates a more natural production setting. By controlling for referent salience and incorporating natural turn-taking, we find that 4-year-olds, just like adults, respect the presuppositions of “the” even in elicited production. They never used definites when intended referents were unfamiliar to the listener; after introducing referents, they mostly used definites to refer to a unique referent and much less so with a non-unique one. This implies, contrary to prior work, that we have little reason to believe that children have the wrong meaning for “the” or lack the pragmatic capacity to use it properly.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |