Learning part names, such as hands of a clock, can be a challenge for children because of the whole object assumption; that is, a child will assume that a given label refers to the whole object (e.g., a clock) rather than the object part (e.g., hands of a clock). We examined the effect of gaze shifting and deliberate pointing on learning part…

In this study, we examined the effects of word and character frequency across three commonly used word-identification tasks (lexical decision, naming, and sentence reading) using the same set of two-character target words (N = 60) and participants (N = 82). Facilitatory effects of word frequency were observed across all three tasks. The…

Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which people learn a particular item and the AoA effect refers to the phenomenon that early-acquired items are processed more quickly and accurately than those acquired later. Over several decades, the AoA effect has been investigated using neuroscientific, behavioral, corpus and computational…

High frequency words have been suggested to benefit both speech segmentation and grammatical categorization of the words around them. Despite utilizing similar information, these tasks are usually investigated separately in studies examining learning. We determined whether including high frequency words in continuous speech could support…

Children are able to resolve the referential ambiguity of learning new words by tracking co-occurrence probabilities across moments in time, a behavior termed cross-situational word learning (CSWL). Although we know that children can use co-occurrence data to map words to objects, the literature has a striking limitation: research has focused on…

Despite many years of investigation into implicit learning in nonlinguistic domains, the potential for implicit learning to deliver the kinds of generalizations that underlie natural language competence remains unclear. In a series of experiments, we investigated implicit learning of the semantic preferences of novel verbs, specifically, whether…

Words differ considerably in the amount of associated semantic information. Despite the crucial role of meaning in language, it is still unclear whether and how this variability modulates language learning. Here, we provide initial evidence demonstrating that implicit learning in repetition priming is influenced by the amount of semantic features…

Learning a new word involves integration with existing lexical knowledge. Previous work has shown that sleep-associated memory consolidation processes are important for the engagement of novel items in lexical competition. In 3 experiments we used spaced exposure regimes to investigate memory for novel words and whether lexical integration can…

Word age-of-acquisition (AoA) affects reading. The mapping hypothesis predicts AoA effects when input--output mappings are arbitrary. In Spanish, the orthography-to-phonology mappings required for word naming are consistent; therefore, no AoA effects are expected. Nevertheless, AoA effects have been found, motivating the present investigation of…