Sarah Allen

Heritage Speakers as Part of the Native Language Continuum

Frontiers in Psychology · 2022-02-09 · 72 citations

We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on equal grounds. We targeted comparable language use in bilingual and monolingual speakers, crucially covering broader repertoires than just formal language. A main database was the open-access RUEG corpus, which covers comparable informal vs. formal and spoken v…

Detecting structured repetition in child-surrounding speech: Evidence from maximally diverse languages

Cognition · 2021-12-23 · 52 citations

Caretakers tend to repeat themselves when speaking to children, either to clarify their message or to redirect wandering attention. This repetition also appears to support language learning. For example, words that are heard more frequently tend to be produced earlier by young children. However, pure repetition only goes so far; some variation between utterances is necessary to support acquisition of a fully productive grammar. When individual words or morphemes are repeated, but embedded in dif…

Effects of speech rate on anticipatory eye movements in the visual world paradigm: Evidence from aging, native, and non-native language processing

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology · 2020-07-24 · 20 citations

Research has shown that suprasegmental cues in conjunction with visual context can lead to anticipatory (or predictive) eye movements. However, the impact of speech rate on anticipatory eye movements has received little empirical attention. The purpose of the current study was twofold. From a methodological perspective, we tested the impact of speech rate on anticipatory eye movements by systemically varying speech rate (3.5, 4.5, 5.5, and 6.0 syllables per second) in the processing of filler-ga…

Innateness is (still) an orienting principle for language development

2026-04-13

The origins of language have been a persistent object of philosophical and scientific inquiry, in part because they offer a window into the origins of thought. Classic innatist theories of language have argued that languages share universal elements that arise because language acquisition is guided by rich, biologically specified structures in the form of a universal grammar. However, different versions of this hypothesis that posit substantial amounts of innate content are not consistent with r…

Innateness is (still) an orienting principle for language development

PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) · 2026-04-12

The origins of language have been a persistent object of philosophical and scientific inquiry, in part because they offer a window into the origins of thought. Classic innatist theories of language have argued that languages share universal elements that arise because language acquisition is guided by rich, biologically specified structures in the form of a universal grammar. However, different versions of this hypothesis that posit substantial amounts of innate content are not consistent with r…