Infants and toddlers experience the world in interaction with others. Likewise, social interactions are important in learning about math--concepts of number ("one," "two," "three"), space ("on top," "upside-down," "round"), and magnitude ("more," "big,"…

When learning a language, typically-developing infants face the daunting task of learning both the sounds and the meanings of words. In this dissertation, we focus on a source of variability that complicates the one-to-one relationship between words and their meanings: wordform variability. In Chapter 1 we make a distinction between the micro…

Understanding how people learn the phonological patterns of their language is a major challenge facing the field of phonology. In this dissertation, I approach the issue of phonological learning by focusing on "saltatory" alternations, which occur when two alternating sounds "leap over" an intermediate, invariant sound (e.g.,…

Lexical categories like noun and verb are foundational to language acquisition, but these categories do not come neatly packaged for the infant language learner. Some have proposed that infants can begin to solve this problem by tracking the frequent nonadjacent word (or morpheme) contexts of these categories. However, nonadjacent relationships…

Previous literature shows that language input is related to the language that children produce. Less is known about how the input provided to children relates to the way that they process language. In this study, this question was explored by looking at the relationships between children's word learning ability and the kinds of names provided by…