Fourteen-month-old infants are unable to link minimal pair nonsense words with novel objects (Stager & Werker, 1997). Might an adult's productions in a word learning context support minimal pair word-object association in these infants? We recorded a mother interacting with her 24-month-old son, and with her 5-month-old son, producing nonsense…

We investigated 16- and 20-month-olds' flexibility in mapping phonotactically illegal words to objects. Using an associative word-learning task, infants were presented with a training phase that either highlighted or did not highlight the referential status of a novel label. Infants were then habituated to two novel objects, each paired with a…

Infants at 1;2 demonstrate difficulty in accessing subtle phonetic information about newly learned word-object pairings (Stager & Werker, 1997). In this study, we examined whether or not infants can access subtle prosodic information such as lexical stress in a word learning task. We tested infants younger than 1;2 to see if they could learn two…

The evolution of young children's categories, as measured by category name production, was studied. Results indicated that four sequences of category evolution were found, formed by the intersection of two factors: overlap vs. mutual exclusivity and first re-assignment separate vs. first re-assignment joint. (26 references) (Author/CB)

Examines the CDI-WORDS Short Form vocabulary checklist as an index of language production. The study focuses on the associations between this short form and directly observed measures of lexical production; the associations between short-form checklists administered at different ages; the predictive associations between short form scores and…