Numerous developmental findings suggest that infants and toddlers engage predictive processing during language comprehension. However, a significant limitation of this research is that associative (bottom-up) and predictive (top-down) explanations are not readily differentiated. Following adult studies that varied predictiveness relative to…

Children improve at word learning during the 2nd year of life--sometimes dramatically. This fact has suggested a change in mechanism, from associative learning to a more referential form of learning. This article presents an associative exemplar-based model that accounts for the improvement without a change in mechanism. It provides a unified…

The present study is an attempt to apply a paradigm to the shift of verbal behavior before and after the age of seven in order to see if linguistic contexts affect verbal behavior differentially before seven or after seven. (Author/CFM)

Analysis of the responses of monolingual Dutch and bilingual Turkish, Moroccan, and Surinamese children living in the Netherlands to word association and sorting tasks revealed no significant differences among the groups. Results of the study indicated that bilingualism does not affect cognitive-linguistic development. (22 references) (Author/VWL)

Because socialization in terms of language behavior is the pivot for all other socialization, great emphasis is being placed in the linguistic determinants of cognition, and the influence of parents' language on child language and cognition. The same life conditions that foster dialect differences may be presumed to lead to semantic differences.…