Emotion and language are very common in young children's everyday lives. Hour by hour, they play, listen, vocalize, react, and emote. Despite the centrality of emotion and language to toddlers' local environments, the dynamic interplay of these communicative signals is practically unexplored. Here, we investigated how fluctuations in caregiver and…

Both classic thought experiments and recent empirical evidence suggest that children frequently encounter new words whose meanings are underdetermined by the extralinguistic contexts in which they occur. The role that these referentially ambiguous events play in children's word learning is central to ongoing debates in the field. Do children learn…

Although identifying the referents of single words is often cited as a key challenge for getting word learning off the ground, it overlooks the fact that young learners consistently encounter words in the context of other words. How does this company help or hinder word learning? Prior investigations into early word learning from children's…

Purpose: The word learning of preschool-age children with developmental language disorder (DLD) is improved when spaced retrieval practice is incorporated into the learning sessions. In this preregistered study, we compared two types of spacing--an expanding retrieval practice schedule and an equally spaced schedule--to determine if one of these…

Bilingual environments present an important context for word learning. One feature of bilingual environments is the existence of translation equivalents (TEs)--words in different languages that share similar meanings. Documenting TE learning over development may give us insight into the mechanisms underlying word learning in young bilingual…

Recent work has investigated the origin of infant colour categories, showing pre-linguistic infants categorise colour even in the absence of colour words. These infant categories are similar but not identical to adult categories, giving rise to an important question about how infant colour perception changes with the learning of colour words. Here…

With only about a third of students in US public schools achieving the NAEP Proficient level, many educators believe students are not getting enough reading practice. However, how much reading practice is enough? This study quantifies the relationship between the amount of book reading and the expected number of words learned. We collected 45…

In word learning, learners need to identify the referent of words by leveraging the fact that the same word may co-occur with different sets of objects. This raises the question, what do children remember from "in the moment" that they can use for cross-situational learning? Furthermore, do children represent pictures of familiar animals…

Word learning is typically studied as a problem in which children need to learn a single meaning for a new word. And by most theories, children's learning is itself guided by the assumption that a new word will have only one meaning. However, the majority of words in languages are polysemous, carrying multiple related and distinct meanings. Here,…

Purpose: This study examines undergraduates' perceptions of the effectiveness of two metacognitive monitoring strategies, active comprehension monitoring (ACM) and audible elaborative rehearsal (AER), for gaining specialized vocabulary and concept (SVC) knowledge in communication sciences and disorders. Method: The participants were 64…

There are calls for developing ways to teach language that can inspire and motivate students to study additional languages. While previous research has pointed toward benefits of arts-based activities in language learning, combining language and dance has mainly been studied with younger language learners. Contextualized within the course…

Numerous studies have documented the benefits of watching audio-visual materials with on-screen text for L2 vocabulary learning (Montero Perez, 2022). The provision of both auditory and textual input allows learners to link auditory and written forms (or L1 meanings) of unknown words during viewing, which could potentially facilitate vocabulary…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the learning potential of French-speaking children, either with typical development (TD) or with developmental language disorder (DLD), when learning an invented inflectional morphological rule. We tested the children's performance in learning pseudomorphemes of gender and number with dynamic assessment…

Studies on multilingual word learning have focused on identifying a bilingual advantage over monolingual peers, paying little attention to the relationships between bilinguals' existing vocabulary size and novel word learning. This study compared monolingual and bilingual school-age children on word learning tasks in familiar and unfamiliar…

Lower vocabulary in German is repeatedly reported for students with Turkish migration background attending school in Germany. We investigated whether in students of Turkish descent (a) learning vocabulary is impaired when the teacher activates the negative stereotype that students with Turkish family language learn less well and (b) whether a…