The Roots of Language Learning: Infant Language Acquisition

The contributions to this special issue were selected from a wealth of studies presented at the first Workshop on Infant Language Development held in Europe (Donostia, Spain) including keynote talks by such prominent infant researchers as Jenny Saffran, Marilyn Vihman, Krista Byers-Heinlin, and Dick Aslin. One of the many goals of this meeting was to bring together researchers who work on the acquisition of various languages. For this reason, research reported in this special issue includes experimental data from German, Japanese, Basque, Spanish, Italian, French, British, English, and American English infants. By investigating various abilities of infants from all these linguistic backgrounds, the articles published within this volume cover the research fields of speech perception development, cognitive development, and the development of word comprehension and production.

Foreword  V Monika Molnar and Nuria Sebastian-Galles     The Roots of Language Learning: Infant Language Acquisition  1–5 Fumitaka Homae, Hama Watanabe, and Gentaro Taga     The Neural Substrates of Infant Speech Perception  6–26 Laurence White, Caroline Floccia, Jeremy Goslin, and Joseph Butler     Utterance-Final Lengthening Is Predictive of Infants’ Discrimination of English Accents  27–44 Monika Molnar, Marie Lallier, and Manuel Carreiras     The Amount of Language Exposure Determines Nonlinguistic Tone Grouping Biases in Infants From a Bilingual Environment  45–64 A´gnes M. Kova´cs     Extracting Regularities From Noise: Do Infants Encode Patterns Based on Same and Different Relations?  65–85 Richard N. Aslin and Elissa L. Newport     Distributional Language Learning: Mechanisms And Models of Category Formation  86–105 Jenny Saffran     Sounds and Meanings Working Together: Word Learning as a Collaborative Effort  106–120 Marilyn May Vihman, Rory A. DePaolis, and Tamar Keren-Portnoy     The Role of Production in Infant Word Learning  121–140 Barbara Höhle, Sabina Pauen, Volker Hesse, and Jürgen Weissenborn     Discrimination of Rhythmic Pattern at 4 Months and Language Performance at 5 Years: A Longitudinal Analysis of Data From German-Learning Children  141–164 Amanda Seidl, Brian French, Yuanyuan Wang, and Alejandrina Cristia     Toward Establishing Continuity in Linguistic Skills Within Early Infancy  165–183 Krista Byers-Heinlein     Languages As Categories: Reframing the “One Language or Two” Question in Early Bilingual Development  184–201