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Until at least 4 years of age, children, unlike adults, interpret  some  as compatible with  all . The inability to draw the pragmatic inference leading to interpret  some  as  not all , could be taken to indicate a delay in pragmatic abilities, despite evidence of other early pragmatic skills. However, little is known about how the production of these implicature develops. We conducted a corpus study on early production and perception of the scalar term  some  in British English. Children's utterances containing  some  were extracted from the dense corpora of five children aged 2;00 to 5;01 ( N  = 5,276), and analysed alongside a portion of their caregivers' utterances with  some  ( N  = 9,030). These were coded into structural and contextual categories allowing for judgments on the probability of a scalar implicature being intended. The findings indicate that children begin producing and interpreting implicatures in a pragmatic way during their third year of life, shortly after they first produce  some . Their production of  some  implicatures is low but matches their parents' input in frequency. Interestingly, the mothers' production of implicatures also increases as a function of the children's age. The data suggest that as soon as they acquire  some , children are fully competent in its production and mirror adult production. The contrast between the very early implicature production we find and the relatively late implicature comprehension established in the literature calls for an explanation; possibly in terms of the processing cost of implicature derivation. Additionally,  some  is multifaceted, and thus, implicatures are infrequent, and structurally and contextually constrained in both populations.

At about 7 months of age, infants listen longer to sentences containing familiar words – but not deviant pronunciations of familiar words (Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995). This finding suggests that infants are able to segment familiar words from fluent speech and that they store words in sufficient phonological detail to recognize deviations from a familiar word. This finding does not examine whether it is, nevertheless, easier for infants to segment words from sentences when these words sound similar to familiar words. Across three experiments, the present study investigates whether familiarity with a word helps infants segment similar‐sounding words from fluent speech and if they are able to discriminate these similar‐sounding words from other words later on. Results suggest that word‐form familiarity may be a powerful tool bootstrapping further lexical acquisition.

Despite the efficiency with which language users typically process spoken language, a growing body of research finds substantial individual differences in both the speed and accuracy of spoken language processing potentially attributable to participants’ literacy skills. Against this background, the current study took a look at the role of word reading skill in listeners’ anticipation of upcoming spoken language input in children at the cusp of learning to read; if reading skills affect predictive language processing, then children at this stage of literacy acquisition should be most susceptible to the effects of reading skills on spoken language processing. We tested 8-year-olds on their prediction of upcoming spoken language input in an eye-tracking task. Although children, like in previous studies to date, were successfully able to anticipate upcoming spoken language input, there was a strong positive correlation between children’s word reading skills (but not their pseudo-word reading and meta-phonological awareness or their spoken word recognition skills) and their prediction skills. We suggest that these findings are most compatible with the notion that the process of learning orthographic representations during reading acquisition sharpens pre-existing lexical representations, which in turn also supports anticipation of upcoming spoken words.

Most children can produce a few words by the end of their first year and rapidly acquire almost 30 times as many words in the following year. Although this general pattern remains the same for children learning different languages, the words individual children know are considerably different. In this article, we consider the possibility that children are an important source of variability in early vocabulary acquisition in the context of curiosity‐driven approaches to language learning. In particular, we review research that supports two interrelated claims: that what children know and what children are interested in interact in shaping what children learn. We suggest that this, as well as the possibility that children are motivated intrinsically to learn language, sets the stage for early vocabulary learning.

Previous behavioural research suggests that infants possess phonologically detailed representations of the vowels and consonants in familiar words. These tasks examine infants’ sensitivity to mispronunciations of a target label in the presence of a target and distracter image. Sensitivity to the mispronunciation may, therefore, be contaminated by the degree of mismatch between the distracter label and the heard mispronounced label. Event-related potential (ERP) studies allow investigation of infants’ sensitivity to the relationship between a heard label (correct or mispronounced) and the referent alone using single picture trials. ERPs also provide information about the timing of lexico-phonological activation in infant word recognition. The current study examined 14-month-olds’ sensitivity to vowel mispronunciations of familiar words using ERP data from single picture trials. Infants were presented with familiar images followed by a correct pronunciation of its label, a vowel mispronunciation or a phonologically unrelated non-word. The results support and extend previous behavioural findings that 14-month-olds are sensitive to mispronunciations of the vowels in familiar words using an ERP task. We suggest that the presence of pictorial context reinforces infants’ sensitivity to mispronunciations of words, and that mispronunciation sensitivity may rely on infants accessing the cross-modal associations between word forms and their meanings.

14-month-olds are sensitive to mispronunciations of the vowels and consonants in familiar words. To examine the development of this sensitivity further, the current study tests 12-month-olds' sensitivity to different kinds of vowel and consonant mispronunciations of familiar words. The results reveal that vocalic changes influence word recognition, irrespective of the kinds of vocalic changes made. While consonant changes influenced word recognition in a similar manner, this was restricted to place and manner of articulation changes. Infants did not display sensitivity to voicing changes. Infants' sensitivity to vowel mispronunciations, but not consonant mispronunciations, was influenced by their vocabulary size - infants with larger vocabularies were more sensitive to vowel mispronunciations than infants with smaller vocabularies. The results are discussed in terms of different models attempting to chart the development of acoustically or phonologically specified representations of words during infancy.

Using a picture pointing task, this study examines toddlers processing of phonological alternations that trigger sound changes in connected speech. Three experiments investigate whether 2 1/2- to 3-year-old children take into account assimilations - processes by which phonological features of one sound spread to adjacent sounds - for the purpose of word recognition (e.g., in English, ten pounds can be produced as te[mp]ounds). English toddlers (n = 18) show sensitivity to native place assimilations during lexical access in Experiment 1. Likewise, French toddlers (n = 27) compensate for French voicing assimilations in Experiment 2. However, French toddlers (n = 27) do not take into account a hypothetical non-native place assimilation rule in Experiment 3, suggesting that compensation for assimilation is already language specific.

Examined whether phonological stress impacts orthographic misspelling processing during silent reading. 20 native German speakers (mean age 23 years) performed a lexical-decision task while electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded. Subjects read sequences of trochaic or iambic disyllabic words with orthographic misspellings introduced by changing the onset consonant of the first or second syllable. Results present strong support for the activation of word stress in silent reading and its influence on the processing of misspellings as reflected in the selective modulation of the N400-like component and the P600 by misspellings in stressed syllables. This was particularly the case when misspelling occurred in the middle of the word, whereas effects of stress were eliminated when misspellings occurred in the more salient word-initial position.

Using the visual world paradigm, we compared first, L1 and L2 speakers’ anticipation of upcoming information in a discourse and second, L1 and L2 speakers’ ability to infer the meaning of unknown words in a discourse based on the semantic cues provided in spoken language context. It was found that native speakers were able to use the given contextual cues, throughout the discourse, to anticipate upcoming linguistic input and fixate targets consistent with the input thus far, while L2 speakers showed weaker effects of discourse context on target fixations. However, both native speakers and L2 learners alike were able to use contextual information to infer the meaning of unknown words embedded in the discourse and fixate images associated with the inferred meanings of these words, especially given adequate contextual information. We suggest that these results reflect similarly successful integration of the preceding semantic information and the construction of integrated mental representations of the described scenarios in L1 and L2.

While the specificity of infants’ early lexical representations has been studied extensively, researchers have only recently begun to investigate how words are organized in the developing lexicon and what mental representations are activated during processing of a word. Integrating these two lines of research, the current study asks how specific the phonological match between a perceived word and its stored form has to be in order to lead to (cascaded) lexical activation of related words during infant lexical processing. We presented German 24-month-olds with a cross-modal semantic priming task where the prime word was either correctly or incorrectly pronounced. Results indicate that correct pronunciations and mispronunciations both elicit similar semantic priming effects, suggesting that the infant word recognition system is flexible enough to handle deviations from the correct form. This might be an important prerequisite to children’s ability to cope with imperfect input and to recognize words under more challenging circumstances.

We examined how L2 exposure early in life modulates toddler word recognition by comparing German–English bilingual and German monolingual toddlers’ recognition of words that overlapped to differing degrees, measured by number of phonological features changed, between English and German (e.g., identical, 1-feature change, 2-feature change, 3-feature change, no overlap). Recognition in English was modulated by language background (bilinguals vs. monolinguals) and by the amount of phonological overlap that English words shared with their L1 German translations. L1 word recognition remained unchanged across conditions between monolingual and bilingual toddlers, showing no effect of learning an L2 on L1 word recognition in bilingual toddlers. Furthermore, bilingual toddlers who had a later age of L2 acquisition had better recognition of words in English than those toddlers who acquired English at an earlier age. The results suggest an important role for L1 phonological experience on L2 word recognition in early bilingual word recognition.

This editorial provides an overview of the Special issue of Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. This Special Issue discusses interrelations between non-linguistic and linguistic representations of cognition and action in development. The special issue is devoted to current empirical evidence from different areas of developmental research. The key question is whether and how non-linguistic and linguistic modes of representation and perception are linked and interrelated during the course of development. This key question was addressed by the different contributions with respect to different areas of development and using a variety of different approaches. The contributions primarily focused on infancy and early childhood, spanning from 9 months to 4 years. This period of life is of particular relevance with respect to language development because children start to produce their first words around their first birthday and their language acquisition undergoes rapid development during the next few years.

Visual cues from the speaker's face, such as the discriminable mouth movements used to produce speech sounds, improve discrimination of these sounds by adults. The speaker's face, however, provides more information than just the mouth movements used to produce speech--it also provides a visual indexical cue of the identity of the speaker. The current article examines the extent to which there is separable encoding of speaker identity in speech processing and asks whether speech discrimination is influenced by speaker identity. Does consistent pairing of different speakers' faces with different sounds--that is, hearing one speaker saying one sound and a second speaker saying the second sound--influence the brain's discrimination of the sounds? ERP data from participants previously exposed to consistent speaker-sound pairing indicated improved detection of the phoneme change relative to participants previously exposed to inconsistent speaker-sound pairing--that is, hearing both speakers say both sounds. The results strongly suggest an influence of visual speaker identity in speech processing.

One of the first challenges facing the young language learner is the task of segmenting words from a natural language speech stream, without prior knowledge of how these words sound. Studies with younger children find that children find it easier to segment words from fluent speech when the words are presented in infant-directed speech, i.e., the kind of speech typically directed toward infants, compared to adult-directed speech. The current study examines whether infants continue to display similar differences in their segmentation of infant- and adult-directed speech later in development. We show that 16-month-old infants successfully segment words from a natural language speech stream presented in the adult-directed register and recognize these words later when presented in isolation. Furthermore, there were no differences in infants’ ability to segment words from infant- and adult-directed speech at this age, although infants’ success at segmenting words from adult-directed speech correlated with their vocabulary size.

Examined whether the processing of individual words in silent reading is impacted by rhythmic properties of the surrounding context. Listeners are sensitive to the metric structure of words, i.e., an alternating pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, in auditory speech processing. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded as 19 participants (mean age 24 years) listened to a sequence of words with a consistent metrical pattern, e.g., a series of trochaic words, suggest that participants register words metrically incongruent with the preceding sequence. Participants' EEG data were recorded as they read lists of either three trochaic or iambic disyllabic words followed by a target word that was either congruent or incongruent with the preceding metric pattern. Results showed that ERPs to targets were modulated by an interaction between metrical structure (iambic vs trochaic) and congruence: for iambs, more positive ERPs were observed in the incongruent than congruent condition 250-400 ms and 400-600 ms poststimulus, whereas no reliable impact of congruence was found for trochees. It is suggested that when iambs are in an incongruent context, i.e., preceded by trochees, the context contains the metrical structure that is more typical in participants' native language which facilitates processing relative to when they are presented in a congruent context, containing the less typical, i.e., iambic, metrical structure. The results provide evidence that comprehenders are sensitive to the prosodic properties of the context even in silent reading, such that this sensitivity impacts lexicosemantic processing of individual words.

Are there individual differences in children's prediction of upcoming linguistic input and what do these differences reflect? Using a variant of the preferential looking paradigm (Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, Cauley, & Gordon, 1987), we found that, upon hearing a sentence like, ``The boy eats a big cake,'' 2-year-olds fixate edible objects in a visual scene (a cake) soon after they hear the semantically constraining verb eats and prior to hearing the word cake. Importantly, children's prediction skills were significantly correlated with their productive vocabulary size--skilled producers (i.e., children with large production vocabularies) showed evidence of predicting upcoming linguistic input, while low producers did not. Furthermore, we found that children's prediction ability is tied specifically to their production skills and not to their comprehension skills. Prediction is really a piece of cake, but only for skilled producers.

We examined the contents of language-mediated prediction in toddlers by investigating the extent to which toddlers are sensitive to visual shape representations of upcoming words. Previous studies with adults suggest limits to the degree to which information about the visual form of a referent is predicted during language comprehension in low constraint sentences. Toddlers (30-month-olds) heard either contextually constraining sentences or contextually neutral sentences as they viewed images that were either identical or shape-related to the heard target label. We observed that toddlers activate shape information of upcoming linguistic input in contextually constraining semantic contexts; hearing a sentence context that was predictive of the target word activated perceptual information that subsequently influenced visual attention toward shape-related targets. Our findings suggest that visual shape is central to predictive language processing in toddlers.

Infants become selectively sensitive to phonological distinctions relevant to their native language at an early age. One might expect that infants bring some of this phonological knowledge to bear in encoding the words they subsequently acquire. In line with this expectation, studies have found that 14-month-olds are sensitive to mispronunciations of initial consonants of familiar words when asked to identify a referent. However, there is very little research investigating infants' sensitivity to vowels in lexical representations. Experiment 1 examines whether infants at 15, 18 and 24 months are sensitive to mispronunciations of vowels in familiar words. The results provide evidence for vowels constraining lexical recognition of familiar words. Experiment 2 compares 15, 18 and 24-month-olds' sensitivity to consonant and vowel mispronunciations of familiar words in order to assess the relative contribution of vowels and consonants in constraining lexical recognition. Our results suggest a symmetry in infants' sensitivity to vowel and consonant mispronunciations early in the second year of life.

Previous research has shown that English infants are sensitive to mispronun ciations of vowels in familiar words by as early as 15-months of age. Thes results suggest that not only are infants sensitive to large mispronunciations of the vowels in words, but also sensitive to smaller mispronunciations, involving changes to only one dimension of the vowel. The current study broadens this research by comparing infants' sensitivity to the different types of changes involved in the mispronunciations. These included changes to the backness, height, and roundedness of the vowel. Our results confirm that 18-month-olds are sensitive to small changes to the vowels in familiar words Our results also indicate a differential sensitivity of vocalic specification, with infants being more sensitive to changes in vowel height and vowel backness than vowel roundedness. Taken together, the results provide clear evidence for specificity of vowels and vocalic features such as vowel height and backness in infants' lexical representations.

Investigated the cognitive processes involved in 24-month-old toddler word recognition by examining how words are represented in a toddler's mind, focusing on whether the phonological properties of words are important for their organization in the toddler lexicon in 2 experiments. A digital video scoring system was used in Experiment 1 to assess visual events while 32 toddlers (aged 23-24 months) were presented with the same experiment used by N. Mani and K. Plunkett (2010) in which phonologically related and unrelated primes were used to see whether the phonological relations between prime target pairs would influence children's target recognition. Despite showing target recognition in both conditions, the toddlers looked longer at the target following unrelated primed trials compared to related primed trials. The authors suggest that this pattern of responding is indicative of lexical-level interference effects influencing target responding in 24-month-olds. In Experiment 2 the only procedural difference was that unprimed baseline trials were included in which 28 toddlers (aged 22-25 months) were presented with a cross in the middle of the screen in place of a prime image followed by the simultaneous presentation of target-distractor images and subsequent naming of the target image. While results added support to the findings of Experiment 1, it was also seen that large cohort trials also resulted in reduced target looking compared to small target cohort trials, indicating that phonological priming is not a necessary condition for the observed lexical level cohort effects. It is concluded that by 24 months of age, children's responding in word recognition tasks approximates to adult-like performance in that words begin to cluster together in the toddler lexicon based on their phonological properties so that word recognition involves the activation and processing of phonologically related words.