Like verbs, adjectives pose a challenge to the young word learner in that some -- like "red," "round," "rough," or "rectangular" -- map onto properties that are detectable through the senses, while others -- like "ready," "reasonable," or "required" -- express abstract…

Young children today are exposed to masks on a regular basis. However, there is limited empirical evidence on how masks may affect word learning. The study explored the effect of masks on infants' abilities to fast-map and generalize new words. Seventy-two Chinese infants (43 males, M[subscript age] = 18.26 months) were taught two novel…

Bilinguals need to learn two words for most concepts. These words are called translation equivalents, and those that also sound similar (e.g., banana-"banane") are called cognates. Research has consistently shown that children and adults process and name cognates more easily than non-cognates. The present study explored if there is such…

Purpose: We measure typically developing monolingual child Spanish speakers' lexical development with a range of standard expressive and receptive tests. We also measure their comprehension of sentences with the existential quantifier "algunos" "some" to determine their abilities to generate "some, but not all" scalar…

The purpose of this study was to compare developmental trajectories of oral language acquisition of children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) and children with typical hearing across the preschool years. Thirty children who are DHH who use amplification and spoken language and 31 children with typical hearing completed an early language and…

Across languages, children map words to meaning with great efficiency, despite a seemingly unconstrained space of potential mappings. The literature on how children do this is primarily limited to spoken language. This leaves a gap in our understanding of sign language acquisition, because several of the hypothesized mechanisms that children use…

The present study examines the mechanisms of lexical case acquisition in Russian by two-to-five-year-old Russian monolingual (n = 54) and Russian-English bilingual children (n = 38). Participants performed a picture-based sentence completion task. Sentences were constructed to elicit production of real Russian words (n = 24) and nonce words (n =…

Sound symbolism, the iconic link between speech sounds and meanings, helps children's verb learning. In sound symbolically rich languages such as Turkish, hearing sound symbolic words might facilitate early verb learning and later language-specific expressions of motion events, by providing an easier way to map verbs onto events. These links could…

Why are spatial metaphors, like the use of "high" to describe a musical pitch, so common? This study tested one hundred and fifty-four 3- to 5-year-old English-learning children on their ability to learn a novel adjective in the domain of space or pitch and to extend this adjective to the untrained dimension. Children were more…

The acquisition of voice in Greek remains understudied, especially in heritage populations. Voice in Greek poses a challenging acquisition task for children due to its syncretism, marking various verb classes as well as passives. The present study explores the acquisition of anticausatives, reflexives, and passives in 6-to-8-year-old monolingual…

When linguistic input contains inconsistent use of grammatical forms, children produce these forms more consistently, a process called "regularization." Deaf children learning American Sign Language from parents who are non-native users of the language regularize their parents' inconsistent usages. In studies of artificial languages…

This research brings new evidence on early lexical acquisition in Wichi, an under-studied indigenous language in which verbs occupy a privileged position in the input and in conjunction with nouns are characterized by a complex and rich morphology. Focusing on infants ranging from one- to three-year-olds, we analyzed the parental report of…

Children show a remarkable degree of consistency in learning some words earlier than others. What patterns of word usage predict variations among words in age of acquisition? We use distributional analysis of a naturalistic corpus of child-directed speech to create quantitative features representing natural variability in word contexts. We…

Purpose: This study examined whether 2-year-olds are better able to acquire novel verb meanings when they appear in varying linguistic contexts, including both content nouns and pronouns, as compared to when the contexts are consistent, including only content nouns. Additionally, differences between typically developing toddlers and late talkers…

A locus of the difference in meaning between distributive and collective sentences can be the quantifiers that modify their subjects. A current theoretical account of distributive and collective sentences claims that sentences with quantifiers such as "the" in English, or "los" in Spanish, in subject position and an indefinite…