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Introduction
Additional affiliations
September 2011 - September 2015
February 1994 - April 1999
June 1999 - present
Publications
Publications (150)
Purpose
This study compares the home language environments of children with (a suspicion of) developmental language disorder (DLD) with that of children with typical development (TD). It does so by adopting new technology that automatically provides metrics about children's language environment (Language ENvironment Analysis [LENA]). In addition, r...
Much like early speech, early signing is characterised by modifications. Sign language phonology has been analysed on the feature level since the 1980s, yet acquisition studies predominately examine handshape, location, and movement. This study is the first to analyse the acquisition of phonology in the sign language of a Balinese village with a vi...
We present an exact replication of Experiment 2 from Kovács and Mehler's 2009 study, which showed that 7‐month‐old infants who are raised bilingually exhibit a cognitive advantage. In the experiment, a sound cue, following an AAB or ABB pattern, predicted the appearance of a visual stimulus on the screen. The stimulus appeared on one side of the sc...
Dutch and German employ voicing contrasts, but Dutch lacks the ‘voiced’ dorsal plosive /ɡ/. We exploited this accidental phonological gap, measuring the presence of prevoicing and voice onset time durations during speech production to determine (1) whether preliterate bilingual Dutch–German and monolingual Dutch-speaking children aged 3;6–6;0 years...
We conducted a close replication of the seminal work by Marcus et al. (1999), which showed that after a brief auditory exposure phase, seven‐month‐old infants were able to learn and generalize a rule to novel syllables not previously present in the exposure phase. This work became the foundation for the theoretical framework by which we assume that...
Purpose
The aim of this study was to gain more insight into the linguistic characterization of dyslexia by investigating vocabulary acquisition. In a previous study, vocabulary at 17 months of age appeared to be related to familial risk (FR) of dyslexia. The aim of this study was to investigate how the differences in lexical composition further dev...
Sign language lexicons incorporate phonological specifications. Evidence from emerging sign languages suggests that phonological structure emerges gradually in a new language. In this study, we investigate variation in the form of signs across 20 deaf adult signers of Kata Kolok, a sign language that emerged spontaneously in a Balinese village comm...
Rhyme perception is an important predictor for future literacy. Assessing rhyme abilities, however, commonly requires children to make explicit rhyme judgements on single words. Here we explored whether infants already implicitly process rhymes in natural rhyming contexts (child songs) and whether this response correlates with later vocabulary size...
The nature of phonological representations has been extensively studied in phonology and psycholinguistics. While full specification is still the norm in psycholinguistic research, underspecified representations may better account for perceptual asymmetries. In this paper, we report on a mismatch negativity (MMN) study with Dutch listeners who took...
Purpose
This study compares online word recognition and prediction in preschoolers with (a suspicion of) a developmental language disorder (DLD) and typically developing (TD) controls. Furthermore, it investigates correlations between these measures and the link between online and off-line language scores in the DLD group.
Method
Using the visual...
In learning the sound patterns of words in a language, children need to acquire not only the segmental but also the prosodic features that mark lexical contrasts, the 'word prosody'. Three types of word prosody have been identified in the literature: lexical tone, lexical pitch accent, and word stress. Both lexical tone and lexical pitch accent use...
We trained a computational model (the Chunk‐Based Learner; CBL) on a longitudinal corpus of child–caregiver interactions in English to test whether one proposed statistical learning mechanism—backward transitional probability—is able to predict children's speech productions with stable accuracy throughout the first few years of development. We pred...
The acquisition of word stress in perspective
This paper reflects on the acquisition of Dutch word stress reported in Nederlandse Taalkunde 1 (1996), where I argued that children systematically build up a grammar for word stress that fits a parameter framework without assuming innate knowledge. In the past 25 years this work has been praised and cr...
This paper compared three different procedures common in infant speech perception research: a headturn preference procedure (HPP) and a central-fixation (CF) procedure with either automated eye-tracking (CF-ET) or manual coding (CF-M). In theory, such procedures all measure the same underlying speech perception and learning mechanisms and the choic...
Infants exploit acoustic boundaries to perceptually organize phrases in speech. This prosodic parsing ability is well‐attested and is a cornerstone to the development of speech perception and grammar. However, infants also receive linguistic input in child songs. This study provides evidence that infants parse songs into meaningful phrasal units an...
(International Sign)
Sign languages can be categorized as shared sign languages or deaf community sign languages, depending on the context in which they emerge. It has been suggested that shared sign languages exhibit more variation in the expression of everyday concepts than deaf community sign languages ( Meir, Israel, Sandler, Padden, & Aronoff...
Children’s songs are a great source for linguistic learning. Here we explore whether children can acquire novel words in a second language by playing a game featuring children’s songs in a playhouse. The playhouse is designed by the Noplica foundation ( www.noplica.nl ) to advance language learning through unsupervised play. We present data from th...
Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant...
Children’s songs are omnipresent and highly attractive stimuli in infants’ input. Previous work suggests that infants process linguistic–phonetic information from simplified sung melodies. The present study investigated whether infants learn words from ecologically valid children’s songs. Testing 40 Dutch-learning 10-month-olds in a familiarization...
Bilingual children are often exposed to non-native speech through their parents. Yet, little is known about the relation between bilingual preschoolers’ speech production and their speech input. The present study investigated the production of voice onset time (VOT) by Dutch-German bilingual preschoolers and their sequential bilingual mothers. The...
Children's songs often contain rhyming words at phrase endings. In this study, we investigated whether infants can already recognize this phonological pattern in songs. Earlier studies using lists of spoken words were equivocal on infants' spontaneous processing of rhymes (Hayes et al., 2000; Jusczyk et al., 1999). Songs, however, constitute an eco...
Adults and toddlers systematically associate pseudowords such as ‘bouba’ and ‘kiki’ with round and spiky shapes respectively, a sound symbolic phenomenon known as the “bouba-kiki effect”. To date, whether this sound symbolic effect is a property of the infant brain present at birth or is a learned aspect of language perception remains unknown. Yet,...
In this study, Limburgian and Dutch 2.5- to 4-year-olds and adults took part in a word learning experiment. Following the procedure employed by Quam and Swingley (2010) and Singh et al. (2014), participants learned two novel word-object mappings. After training, word recognition was tested in correct pronunciation (CP) trials and mispronunciation (...
This study assesses the effects of age and language exposure on VOT production in 29 simultaneous bilingual children aged 3;7 to 5;11 who speak German as a heritage language in the Netherlands. Dutch and German have a binary voicing contrast, but the contrast is implemented with different VOT values in the two languages. The results suggest that bi...
Despite the fact that many of the world's languages use lexical tone, the majority of language acquisition studies has focused on non-tone languages. Research on tone languages has typically investigated well-known tone languages such as Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese. The current study looked at a Limburgian dialect of Dutch that uses lexical pitc...
A central assumption in the perceptual attunement literature holds that exposure to a speech sound contrast leads to improvement in native speech sound processing. However, whether the amount of exposure matters for this process has not been put to a direct test. We elucidated indicators of frequency-dependent perceptual attunement by comparing 5-8...
Speech of late bilinguals has frequently been described in terms of cross-linguistic influence (CLI)
from the native language (L1) to the second language (L2), but CLI from the L2 to the L1 has
received relatively little attention. This article addresses L2 attainment and L1 attrition in voicing
systems through measures of voice onset time (VOT) in...
A cleft palate (CP) impacts speech and speech development. CP children have articulatory problems; particularly with oral stop consonants, which are often produced more backwards (labial and coronal stops are often produced as dorsal or glottal stops) (1-4). This study investigates whether the articulatory problems of CP children (18- and 30-month...
Although toddlers in their 2nd year of life generally have phonologically detailed representations of words, a consistent lack of sensitivity to certain kinds of phonological changes has been reported. The origin of these insensitivities is poorly understood, and uncovering their cause is crucial for obtaining a complete picture of early phonologic...
This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on how much detail young children's word representations contain. We investigate early representations of place of articulation and voicing contrasts, inspired by previously attested asymmetrical patterns in children's early word productions. We tested Dutch-learning 20- and 24-month-olds’ perception of...
During language acquisition, infants frequently encounter ambient noise. We present a computational model to address whether specific acoustic processing abilities are necessary to detect known words in moderate noise—an ability attested experimentally in infants. The model implements a general purpose speech encoding and word detection procedure....
The voicing contrast is neutralized syllable and word finally in Dutch and German, leading to alternations within the morphological paradigm (e.g., Dutch ‘bed(s)’, be[t]-be[d]en, German ‘dog(s)’, Hun[t]-Hun[d]e). Despite structural similarity, language-specific morphological, phonological and lexical properties impact on the distribution of this al...
Adults achieve successful coordination during conversation by using prosodic and lexicosyntactic cues to predict upcoming changes in speakership. We examined the relative weight of these linguistic cues in the prediction of upcoming turn structure by toddlers learning Dutch (Experiment 1; N = 21) and British English (Experiment 2; N = 20) and adult...
The VALID Data Archive is an open multimedia data archive in which data from children and adults with language and/or communication problems are brought together. A pilot project, funded by CLARIN-NL, was carried out in which five existing data sets were curated. This pilot enabled us to build up experience in conserving different kinds of patholog...
Numerous studies have revealed an asymmetry tied to the perception of coronal place of articulation: participants accept a labial mispronunciation of a coronal target, but not vice versa. Whether or not this asymmetry is based on language-general properties or arises from language-specific experience has been a matter of debate. The current study s...
The present article investigates the acquisition of Manner of Articulation (MoA) contrasts in child language production. We analyzed spontaneous longitudinal speech data of four German and six Dutch 1- to 3-year-olds. The data suggest that the acquisition of MoA contrasts is influenced by various co-occurrence constraints at the word level. Interes...
The Given-before-New principle has been identified as one of the strongest pragmatic principles governing how information is organised in adult grammar (Clark & Clark 1977, Gundel 1988). The question of whether child grammars organise information in the same way is as yet unresolved. We address this question by considering the Dative Alternation in...
This study investigated the phonological representations of vowels in children's native and non-native lexicons. Two experiments were mispronunciation tasks (i.e., a vowel in words was substituted by another vowel from the same language). These were carried out by Dutch-speaking 9–12-year-old children and Dutch-speaking adults, in their native (Exp...
Directional asymmetries in vowel perception are attributed a key role in language acquisition. Therefore, it is of the outmost importance to understand why such asymmetries exist. In the theoretical portion of this thesis, we first provide an overview of current hypotheses. One of them suggests that directional asymmetries in vowel perception are c...
Toddlers' discrimination of native phonemic contrasts is generally unproblematic. Yet using those native contrasts in word learning and word recognition can be more challenging. In this article, we investigate perceptual versus phonological explanations for asymmetrical patterns found in early word recognition. We systematically investigated the us...
In this paper we use a computational model to investigate four assumptions that are tacitly present in interpreting the results of studies on infants' speech processing abilities using the Headturn Preference Procedure (HPP): (1) behavioral differences originate in different processing; (2) processing involves some form of recognition; (3) words ar...
Spontaneous child language data are often extremely variable: the same child may utter words in many different ways even during the same session (within child variation) and children often differ in the way they produce particular structures (across child variation), leading to different learning paths for different children. This paper focuses on...
Language acquisition is a process embedded in social routines. Despite considerable attention in research to its social nature, little is known about developmental differences in the relative priority of certain social cues over others during early word learning. Employing an eye-tracking paradigm, we presented 14-month-old infants, 24-month-old in...
This research investigates children's knowledge of how surface pronunciations of lexical items vary according to their phonological and morphological context. Dutch-learning children aged 2.5 and 3.5 years were tested on voicing neutralization and morphophonological alternations. For instance, voicing does not alternate between the pair [pɛt]~[pɛtə...
Research has shown that givenness is one of several factors that influence the choice of word order with the Dative Alternation in languages such as English. This paper investigates to what extent Norwegian children between the ages of 4;2 and 6;0 are sensitive to this factor in production. In order to test this, an experiment was carried out in wh...
Language acquisition is a process embedded in social routines. Despite considerable
attention in research to its social nature, little is known about developmental differences in
the relative priority of certain social cues over others during early word learning.
Employing an eye‐tracking paradigm, we presented 14‐month‐old infants, 24‐month‐old
in...
Particle verbs are particle-verb combinations of which the constituting elements may or may not appear separately. This article looks at a subgroup of particle verbs with a preposition as their first part, like opbellen [to call]. When using a particle verb in a verbal cluster at the
end of a clause, a Dutch speaker is free to choose between keepin...
Pronouns seem to be acquired in an asymmetrical way, where children confuse the meaning of pronouns with reflexives up to the age of six, but not vice versa. Children's production of the same referential expressions is appropriate at the age of four. However, response-based tasks, the usual means to investigate child language comprehension, are ver...
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This paper examines whether there is an asymmetry in production and perception of the stop-fricative contrast by Dutch learning children. The development of stops and fricatives in both word-initial and post-vocalic position is studied. To investigate the acquisition of stops and fricatives in production, longitudinal spontaneous speech data of six...
In optimality theory (OT) the essence of both language learning in general (learnability) and language acquisition (the actual development children go through) entails the ranking of constraints from an initial state of the grammar to the language-specific ranking of the target grammar. This is the common denominator in all OT studies on language a...
IntroductionThe Word Prosodic System of West GermanicFrom West Germanic to Old EnglishFrom Old English to Middle EnglishChanges in Stress: Middle English to Early Modern EnglishConclusion
Recent research in language acquisition argues that production plays a unique role in the acquisition of phonological and lexical representations [Fikkert. In press, LabPhonX]. In this research, we investigate the effect of production in early lexical acquisition. Twenty Dutch‐learning children participated in a word‐learning task, where children w...
Interspeech 2007 (Antwerp [B], August 27-31).
We analysed intonation contours of two-word utterances from three monolingual Dutch children aged between 1;4 and 2;1 in the autosegmental-metrical framework. Our data show that children have mastered the inventory of the boundary tones and nuclear pitch accent types (except for L*HL and L*!HL) at the 160-word level, and the set of non-downstepped...
We consider two theories of laryngeal representation, one using a single feature [voice] generalizing across prevoicing languages and aspiration languages, and the other using multiple features: [voice] for pre-voicing languages and [spread glottis] for aspiration languages. We derive predictions for children's early productions, and test these for...
We analysed intonation contours of two-word utterances from three monolingual Dutch children aged between 1;4 and 2;1 in the autosegmental-metrical framework. Our data show that children have mastered the inventory of the boundary tones and nuclear pitch accent types (except for L*HL and L*!HL) at the 160-word level, and the set of non-downstepped...
The acquisition of morphophonological alternations is hardly investigated in phonology (Macken 1995, Bernhardt & Stemberger 1998, Hayes 2004, Kerkhoff 2004). Learnability models of phonological alternations often assume that allophonic variation is easy to learn, as it usually follows from the phonology of the language (Peperkamp & Dupoux 2002, Hay...
In this paper, we argue that the earliest lexical phonological representations of 14-month-old infants are global and underspecified with respect to place of articulation: at first, only the feature of the stressed vowel in the word is represented and used for the whole word. Moreover, coronal is underspecified. This was tested in five word-learnin...