This study investigated the roles of associative learning and linguistic knowledge, in particular phonological and semantic knowledge, in word learning of Chinese readers using a cross-sectional design. Extending past research in associative learning using existing Chinese characters as word stimuli, this study resorted to pseudowords and invented…

This Special Issue of "Language Learning" presents an interdisciplinary state-of-the-art overview of current approaches to linguistic relativity. It contains empirical and theoretical studies and reflections on linguistic relativity from a variety of perspectives, such as associative learning, conceptual transfer, multilingual awareness,…

The present research demonstrates that very brief variations in affect, being around 1 s in length and changing from trial to trial independently from semantic relatedness of primes and targets, modulate the amount of semantic priming. Implementing consonant and dissonant chords (Experiments 1 and 5), naturalistic sounds (Experiment 2), and visual…

We examined whether 12-month-old infants privilege words over other linguistic stimuli in an associative learning task. Sixty-four infants were presented with sets of either word-object, communicative sound-object, or consonantal sound-object pairings until they habituated. They were then tested on a "switch" in the sound to determine whether they…