We present a neurocomputational model with self-organizing maps that accounts for the emergence of taxonomic responding and fast mapping in early word learning, as well as a rapid increase in the rate of acquisition of words observed in late infancy. The quality and efficiency of generalization of word-object associations is directly related to…

One of the central themes in the study of language acquisition is the gap between the linguistic knowledge that learners demonstrate, and the apparent inadequacy of linguistic input to support induction of this knowledge. One of the first linguistic abilities in the course of development to exemplify this problem is in speech perception:…

Previous research has demonstrated that infants under 17 months have difficulty learning novel words in the laboratory when the words differ by only one consonant sound, irrespective of the magnitude of that difference. The current study explored whether 15-month-old infants can learn novel words that differ in only one vowel sound. The rich…

The ability to automatically and implicitly detect complex and noisy regularities in the environment is a fundamental aspect of human cognition. Despite considerable interest in implicit processes, few researchers have conceptualized implicit learning as an ability with meaningful individual differences. Instead, various researchers (e.g., Reber,…

Functional imaging studies of single word production have consistently reported activation of the lateral prefrontal and cingulate cortex. Its contribution has been shown to be sensitive to task demands, which can be manipulated by the degree of response specification. Compared with classical verbal fluency, free word association relies less on…

The assessment of so-called depth of word knowledge has been the focus of research for some years now. In this article the construct of deep word knowledge is further specified as the decontextualized knowledge of word meanings and word associations. Most studies so far have involved adolescent and adult second language learners. In this article,…

Artificial grammar learning (AGL) is one of the most commonly used paradigms for the study of implicit learning and the contrast between rules, similarity, and associative learning. Despite five decades of extensive research, however, a satisfactory theoretical consensus has not been forthcoming. Theoretical accounts of AGL are reviewed, together…

Results of a word association task administered to second and sixth grade children and adults suggest that whether the word association response is of the same or different form as the stimulus word is related to the word-count frequency of the stimulus and the participants age. (Author/KM)

Preschool children's ability to associate pairs of toys was studied under one of four experimental conditions. All three subject-involvement conditions produced better learning. (ST)

Two studies tested the observation that infants learn to use a "whole object assumption" between the ages of 8 and 15 months, meaning that they expect a word to apply to the whole object to which it refers. The first study investigated the possibility that infants of 8 to 10 months may attend differently, and more selectively, to events…

In two experiments, the use of mutual exclusivity in the naming of whole objects was examined in monolingual and bilingual 3- and 6-year-olds. Once an object has a known name, then via principles of mutual exclusivity it is often assumed that a new name given to the object must refer to some part, substance, or other property of the object.…

Young children are readily able to use known labels to constrain hypotheses about the meanings of new words under conditions of referential ambiguity. At issue is the kind of information children use to constrain such hypotheses. According to one theory, children take into account the speaker's intention when solving a referential puzzle. In the…

This study examined the influence of semantic consistency (meaningfulness) and anomaly on the learning of three types of syntactic pairs. The results showed that meaningful pairs are learned with fewer errors than anomalous pairs. (Author)

In a response to Halliday (1993), Gee (1994) discussed the analogies between learning a language and learning in general. The article presents two of his proposals and discusses an empirical method for studying them. The article focuses on identifying the units acquired during language learning and the relevance of the concept of an innate…

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)