Upon hearing a novel label, listeners tend to assume that it refers to a novel, rather than a familiar object. While this disambiguation or mutual exclusivity (ME) effect has been robustly shown across development, it is unclear what it involves. Do listeners use their pragmatic and lexical knowledge to exclude the familiar object and thus select…

Learning to walk leads to an increase in language abilities; however, the underlying mechanisms accounting for this relation remain unclear. Investigating the quality of early gait control may offer some insights. The purpose of this study was to: (1) quantify how 13-month-olds (n = 39; 39% male) and 24-month-olds (n = 39; 59% male) adapt gait…

Associative word learning, the ability to pair a concept to a word, is an essential mechanism for early language development. One common method by which researchers measure this ability is the Switch task (Werker, Cohen, Lloyd, Casasola, & Stager, 1998), wherein infants are habituated to 2 word-object pairings and then tested on their ability…

As a spoken word unfolds over time, similar sounding words ("cap" and "cat") compete until one word "wins". Lexical competition becomes more efficient from infancy through adolescence. We examined one potential mechanism underlying this development: lexical inhibition, by which activated candidates suppress…

We investigated toddlers' phonological representations of common vowel-initial words that can take on multiple surface forms in the input. In French, liaison consonants are inserted and are syllabified as onsets in subsequent vowel-initial words, for example, petit /t/ éléphant [little elephant]. We aimed to better understand the impact on…

Given the importance of writing for academic achievement, this study aimed to understand how early oral language contributes to later writing skills. The first objective was to determine if preschool language skills were associated with high school writing, and if so, whether they contributed directly or indirectly through school age language. The…

Within a language, there is considerable variation in the pronunciations of words owing to social factors like age, gender, nationality, and race. In the present study, we investigate whether toddlers link social and linguistic variation during word learning. In Experiment 1, 24- to 26-month-old toddlers were exposed to two talkers whose front…

English-learning infants attend to lexical stress when learning new words. Attention to lexical stress might be beneficial for word learning by providing an indication of the grammatical class of that word. English disyllabic nouns commonly have trochaic (strong-weak) stress, whereas English disyllabic verbs commonly have iambic (weak-strong)…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

Recently it has been proposed that sensitivity to nonarbitrary relationships between speech sounds and objects potentially bootstraps lexical acquisition. However, it is currently unclear whether preverbal infants (e.g., before 6 months of age) with different linguistic profiles are sensitive to such nonarbitrary relationships. Here, the authors…

Both early childhood maternal language input and the quality of classroom instruction in elementary school have been shown to be important environmental supports in predicting children's literacy skill development. However, no studies have simultaneously examined these two environmental supports in relation to children's early language skills and…

We report a study that explored the mechanisms used in hypothesizing meanings for novel motion predicates (verbs and prepositions) cross-linguistically. Motion stimuli were presented to English- and Greek-speaking adults and preschoolers accompanied by (a) a novel intransitive verb, (b) a novel transitive verb, (c) a novel transitive preposition,…

Language is rife with ambiguity. Do children and adults meet this challenge in similar ways? Recent work suggests that while adults resolve syntactic ambiguities by integrating a variety of cues, children are less sensitive to top-down evidence. We test whether this top-down insensitivity is specific to syntax or a general feature of children's…

During the first half of the 2nd year of life, infants struggle to use phonemic distinctions in label-object association tasks. Prior experiments have demonstrated that exposure to the phonemes in distinct lexical forms (e.g., /"d"/ and /"t"/ in "daddy" and "tiger", respectively) facilitates infants' use of phonemic contrasts but also that they…

Is "two" ever a plural marker in child language? By some accounts, children bootstrap the distinction between the words "one" and "two" by observing their use with singular-plural marking ("one ball/two balls"). Others argue that the numeral "two" marks plurality before children begin using numerals to denote precise quantities. We tested the…