Roots of Language Learning: Infant Language Acquisition

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.

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