What role does contextual information play in children's early word comprehension? Using an inter-modal preferential looking task, we investigated how different background contexts influence children's looking times before and after an image has been named. Prior to the experiment, early comprehension of words was assessed using parental…

Explored the interplay between gestures and words in the early vocabulary of 12 normally developing Italian children at 16 and 20 months of age. Focused on spontaneous production of verbal and gestural types and tokens to assess the diversity and semantic content of the verbal and gestural vocabularies. Results indicated that gestures were used…

A study of two year olds investigated the nature and development of children's early productivity with verb-argument structure and verb morphology. Results indicated that the children showed no signs of productive verb morphology, but they did use newly learned verbs in some creative ways involving nounlike uses and the appending of locatives.…