Computational and animal models suggest that the unlearning or pruning of incorrect meanings matters for word learning. However, it is currently unclear how such pruning occurs during word learning and to what extent it depends on supervised and unsupervised learning. In two experiments (N[subscript 1] = 40; N[subscript 2] = 42), adult…

How does one assess developmental change when the measures themselves change with development? Most developmental studies of word learning use either looking (infants) or pointing (preschoolers and older). With little empirical evidence of the relationship between the two measures, developmental change is difficult to assess. This paper analyzes…

Human word learning is remarkable: We not only learn thousands of words but also form organized semantic networks in which words are interconnected according to meaningful links, such as those between "apple," "juicy," and "pear." These links play key roles in our abilities to use language. How do words become…

Many studies have demonstrated that listeners use information extracted from verbs to guide anticipatory eye movements to objects in the visual context that satisfy the selection restrictions of the verb. An important question is what underlies such verb-mediated anticipatory eye gaze. Based on empirical and theoretical suggestions, we…

We report three eyetracking experiments that examine the learning procedure used by adults as they pair novel words and visually presented referents over a sequence of referentially ambiguous trials. Successful learning under such conditions has been argued to be the product of a learning procedure in which participants provisionally pair each…

The aim of this study was to examine the combined influences of infants' attention and use of social cues in the prediction of their language outcomes. This longitudinal study measured infants' visual attention on a distractibility task (11 months), joint attention (14 months), and language outcomes (word-object association, 14 months; MBCDI…