“Origins of communicative disorders ” to Elizabeth Bates, and by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. We are grateful to Larry Juarez and Meiti Opie The effects of focal brain injury are investigated in the first stages of language development, during the passage from first words to grammar. Parent report and/or free speech data are reported for 53 infants and preschool children between 10- 44 months of age. All children had suffered a single, unilateral brain injury to the left or right hemisphere, incurred before six months of age (usually in the pre- or perinatal period). This is the period in which we should expect to see maximal plasticity, but it is also the period in which the initial specializations of particular cortical regions ought to be most evident. In direct contradiction of hypotheses based on the adult aphasia literature, results from 10- 17 months suggest that children with righthemisphere injuries are at greater risk for delays in word comprehension, and in the gestures that normally precede and accompany language onset. Although there were no differences between left- vs. right-hemisphere injury per se on expressive language, children whose lesions include the left temporal lobe did show significantly greater delays in expressive vocabulary and

Language is a unique hallmark of the human species. Although many species can communicate in limited ways about things that are physically present, only humans can construct a full narrative characterization of events occurring outside of the here and now. Humans are also unique in their ability to fashion tools such as arrow points, axes, traps, and clothing. By using language to control the social coordination of tool making, humans have produced a material society that has achieved domination over all the creatures of our world and often over Nature herself. The religions of the world have interpreted our unique linguistic endowment as a Special Gift bestowed directly by the Creator. Scientists have also been influenced by this view of language, often attributing the emergence of this remarkable species-specific ability to some single, pivotal salutatory event in human evolution. I will refer to this sudden evolutionary jump into true human language as linguistic saltation. Linguistic saltationists (Bickerton, 1990; Chomsky, 1975; Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002) tend to see language as a very recent evolutionary event. They can note that the divergence of our hominid ancestors from the Great Apes occurred over 6 million years

The mechanism by which humans perceive others differs greatly from how humans perceive inanimate objects. Unlike inanimate objects, humans have the distinct property of being “like me ” in the eyes of the observer. This allows us to use the same systems that process knowledge about self-performed actions, self-conceived thoughts, and self-experienced emotions to understand actions, thoughts, and emotions in others. The authors propose that internal simulation mechanisms, such as the mirror neuron system, are necessary for normal development of recognition, imitation, theory of mind, empathy, and language. Additionally, the authors suggest that dysfunctional simulation mechanisms may underlie the social and communicative deficits seen in individuals with autism spectrum disorders.

Recently a number of quasi-experimental studies have investigated the potential of a crossmodality transfer of second language competency between real-time, conversational exchange via

The salience of infants ' vocal and visual cues was examined to evaluate the efficacy of prelinguistic vocalizations to guide adult behavior. A videotape, constructed of brief behavioral episodes from 3 infants with different-sized vocal repertoires, was played to 40 mothers of prelinguistic infants. Playback mothers ' responses to the episodes were consistent, demonstrating that preverbal behavior elicits comparable reactions across unfamiliar receivers. The audio and video components of the infants ' episodes were then recombined. As the vocal repertoire of the stimulus infants increased, changes in the audio component more often led playback mothers to change responses. Thus, playback mothers used vocalizations as cues as the infants ' vocal repertoires became larger. Investigating receivers ' responses to infants ' vocal behavior is a first step in evaluating the role of social feedback as a mechanism of human vocal learning. Although infant vocalizations can be conditioned by consistent social reinforcement (Rheingold, Gerwitz, & Ross, 1959; Routh, 1969; Weisberg, 1963), noncrying infant sounds have rarely been studied in terms of their functional effects on the responses of social partners. Prelinguistic sounds are often considered to be biologically predetermined (Bloom, 1993), and the development of vocal learning is held to an internal program of physiological and cognitive maturation. However, feedback from companions may provide reliable cues about the consequences of vocalizing and serve as a source of learning for the infant. Data from deaf and hearing-impaired infants

Abstract not found

Results of a previous listening test have indicated that tonal word accent contours present in 12- and 18-monthers' babbling may provide listeners with perceptually reliable cues to ambient language. In particular, Swedish 18- and, to some extent, 12-monthers were judged to produce more grave accent-like vocalizations than were American English children in the same age-groups.

Purpose: This research assessed the influence of visual speech on phonological processing by children with hearing loss (HL). Method: Children with HL and children with normal hearing (NH) named pictures while attempting to ignore auditory or audiovisual speech distractors whose onsets relative to the pictures were either congruent, conflicting in place of articulation, or conflicting in voicing—for example, the picture “pizza ” coupled with the distractors “peach,”“teacher, ” or “beast, ” respectively. Speed of picture naming was measured. Results: The conflicting conditions slowed naming, and phonological processing by children with HL displayed the age-related shift in sensitivity to visual speech seen in children with NH, although with developmental delay. Younger children with HL exhibited a disproportionately large influence of visual speech and a negligible influence of auditory speech, whereas older children with HL showed a robust influence of auditory speech with no benefit to performance from adding visual speech. The congruent conditions did not speed naming in children with HL, nor did the addition of visual speech influence performance. Unexpectedly, the / ^ /-vowel congruent distractors slowed naming in children with HL and decreased articulatory proficiency. Conclusions: Results for the conflicting conditions are consistent with the hypothesis that speech representations in children with HL (a) are initially disproportionally structured in terms of visual speech and (b) become better specified with age in terms of auditorily encoded information. KEY WORDS: phonological processing, lipreading, picture–word task, multimodal speech perception For decades, evidence has suggested that visual speech may play an important role in learning the phonological structure of spoken language

This paper introduces a model where a group of interactive autonomous singing robots programmed with appropriate motor, auditory and cognitive skills can evolve a shared lexicon of sonic intonation patterns from scratch, after a period of spontaneous creation, adjustment and memory reinforcement. Musical expectation is defined as a sensory-motor mechanism whereby the robots evolve vectors of motor control parameters to produce imitations of heard intonation patterns. 1

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