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

Monika Molnar received her PhD from the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders within the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. At McGill, Dr. Molnar conducted research on monolingual and bilingual speech perception development. Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (in Donostia, Spain) where she is focusing on bilingual language acquisition.

Nuria Sebastian-Galles received her PhD in Experimental Psychology at the University of Barcelona in Spain. After her postdoctoral training at the Max Planck Institute and the LSCP-CNRS in Paris, she was appointed as Associate Professor at the University of Barcelona. Currently, Dr. Sebastian-Galles is the director of the Speech Acquisition & Perception Laboratory at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. She has authored over 100 publications within the fields of speech acquisition, bilingualism, and cognitive neuroscience. She is an Associate Editor of Developmental Science, and of Language Learning and Development; also, she is the editor of the Cognitive Neuroscience Series of Language Learning. At present, Dr. Sebastian-Galles is the vice-president of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council.