A cross-cultural investigation of the influence of target-language in babbling was carried out. 1047 vowels produced by twenty 10-monthold infants from Parisian French, London English, Hong Kong Cantonese and Algiers Arabic language backgrounds were recorded in the cities of origin and spectrally analysed. F1-F2 plots of these vowels were obtained for each subject and each language group. Statistical analyses provide evidence of differences between infants across language backgrounds. These differences parallel those found in adult speech in the corresponding languages. Implications of an early build-up of targetlanguage-oriented production skills are discussed.

Samples of babbling productions of 6-, 8- and 10-month-old infants from different language backgrounds were presented to adult judges whose task was to identify the infants from their own linguistic community. The results show that certain language-specific metaphonological cues render this identification possible when the samples exhibit long and coherent intonation patterns. The segmental indications that are present in the fully syllabic productions of canonical babbling do not allow the judges to identify the infants correctly from their own linguistic community. These results seem to support the hypothesis of an early influence on babbling of the metaphonological characteristics of the target language.

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The sensitivity and specificity of chest CT for the diagnosis of bronchial foreign body must be validated by a prospective study. A national multicentre study is currently underway to determine whether CT can replace flexible bronchoscopy when the diagnosis of bronchial foreign body is uncertain.

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The development and professionalization of a video game requires tools for analyzing the practice of the players and teams, their tactics and strategies. These games are very popular and by nature numerical, they provide many tracks that we analyzed in terms of team play. We studied Defense of the Ancients (DotA), a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA), where two teams battle in a game very similar to rugby or American football. Through topological measures - area of polygon described by the players, inertia, diameter, distance to the base - that are independent of the exact nature of the game, we show that the outcome of the match can be relevantly predicted. Mining e-sport's tracks is opening interest in further application of these tools for analyzing real time sport

Wide individual differences in early word production characterize children learning the same language, but the role of specific adult input in this interchild variability is unknown. Sampling the speech of American, French, and Swedish mothers (5 in each language group) to their 1-year-old children, this study analyzed the distribution of consonantal categories, word length, and final consonants in running speech, content words, initial consonant of content words, and target words (adult models of words attempted by the children) as well as the children's own early words (from age 9 months to about 18 months). Variability is greater in child words than adult speech, and individual mother-child dyads show no evidence of specific maternal influence on the phonetics of the child's speech. 651 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

The first part of this study examined (Parisian) French-learning 11-month-old infants' recognition of the six definite and indefinite French articles: le, la, les, un, une, des. The six articles were compared with pseudo articles in the context of disyllabic or monosyllabic nouns, using the Head-turn Preference Procedure. The pseudo articles were similar to real articles in terms of phonetic composition and phonotactic probability, and real and pseudo noun phrases were alike in terms of overall prosodic contour. In three experiments, 11-month-old infants showed preference for real over pseudo articles, suggesting they have the articles' word-forms stored in long-term memory. The second part of the study evaluates several hypotheses about the role of articles in 11-month-olds infants' word recognition. Evidence from three experiments support the view that articles help infants to recognize the following words. We propose that 11-month-olds have the capacity to parse noun phrases into their constituents, which is consistent with the more general view that function words define a syntactic skeleton that serves as a basis for parsing spoken utterances. This proposition is compared to a competing account, which argues that 11-month-olds recognize noun-phrases as whole-words.