Two experiments focus on Thai tone perception by native speakers of tone languages (Thai, Cantonese, and Mandarin), a pitch-accent (Swedish), and a nontonal (English) language. In Experiment 1, there was better auditory-only and auditory-visual discrimination by tone and pitch-accent language speakers than by nontone language speakers. Conversely and counterintuitively, there was better visual-only discrimination by nontone language speakers than tone and pitch-accent language speakers. Nevertheless, visual augmentation of auditory tone perception in noise was evident for all five language groups. In Experiment 2, involving discrimination in three fundamental frequency equivalent auditory contexts, tone and pitch-accent language participants showed equivalent discrimination for normal Thai speech, filtered speech, and violin sounds. In contrast, nontone language listeners had significantly better discrimination for violin sounds than filtered speech and in turn speech. Together the

For more than 20 years, the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) and its adaptations for languages other than English have been used as reliable measures of infants' and toddlers' early receptive and productive vocabulary size. This article introduces the OZI, the Australian English adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates CDI, now normed for 12-to 30-month-old children. The findings of two studies are presented: (1) a comparison study that demonstrated that toddlers (N = 64) acquiring Australian English (24-and 30-month-olds) obtain higher productive vocabulary scores on the OZI than the MacArthur-Bates CDI; and (2) an OZI norming study that included 12-to 30-month-old Australian infants and toddlers (N = 1496). These studies provide (i) evidence for the greater applicability of the OZI for infants and toddlers learning Australian English and (ii) productive vocabulary acquisition norms for Australian English for ages 12-30 months, a research and diagnostic tool highly anticipated by researchers and clinicians around Australia.

The Language Environment Analysis system LENA TM is used to capture day-long recordings of children's natural audio environment. The system performs automated segmentation of the recordings and provides estimates for various measures. One of those measures is Adult Word Count (AWC), an approximation of the number of words spoken by adults in close proximity to the child. The LENA system was developed for and trained on American English, but it has also been evaluated on its performance when applied to Spanish, Mandarin and French. The present study is the first evaluation of the LENA system applied to Swedish, and focuses on the AWC estimate. Twelve five-minute segments were selected at random from each of four day-long recordings of 30-month-old children. Each of these 48 segments was transcribed by two transcribers, and both number of words and number of vowels were calculated (inter-transcriber reliability for words: r = .95, vowels: r = .93). Both counts correlated with the LENA system's AWC estimate for the same segments (words: r = .67, vowels: r = .66). The reliability of the AWC as estimated by the LENA system when applied to Swedish is therefore comparable to its reliability for Spanish, Mandarin and French.

Neural correlates of lexical stress were studied using the mismatch negativity (MMN) component in event-related potentials. The MMN responses were expected to reveal the encoding of stress information into long-term memory and the contributions of prosodic features such as fundamental frequency (F0) and intensity toward lexical access. In a passive oddball paradigm, neural responses to changes in F0, intensity, and in both features together were recorded for words and pseudowords. The findings showed significant differences not only between words and pseudowords but also between prosodic features. Early processing of prosodic information in words was indexed by an intensity-related MMN and an F0-related P200. These effects were stable at right-anterior and mid-anterior regions. At a later latency, MMN responses were recorded for both words and pseudowords at the mid-anterior and posterior regions. The P200 effect observed for F0 at the early latency for words developed into an MMN response. Intensity elicited smaller MMN for pseudowords than for words. Moreover, a larger brain area was recruited for the processing of words than for the processing of pseudowords. These findings suggest earlier and higher sensitivity to prosodic changes in words than in pseudowords, reflecting a language-related process. The present study, therefore, not only establishes neural correlates of lexical stress but also confirms the presence of long-term memory traces for prosodic information in the brain.