Efficient language use involves the capacity to flexibly adjust to varied pronunciations of words. Although children can contend with some accent variability before their second birthday, it is currently unclear when and how this ability reaches its mature state. In a series of five experiments, we examine the developmental trajectory of…

This work explores whether the facilitative effect of causal information on preschoolers' word and descriptive fact learning persists in school-age children. Twenty-three 5-year-olds just beginning school and 23 6- to 7-year-olds who had accumulated over a year of schooling were taught novel words along with descriptions of causally rich,…

Recent work has demonstrated that the addition of multiple talkers during habituation improves 14-month-olds' performance in the switch task (Rost & McMurray, 2009). While the authors suggest that this boost in performance is due to the increase in acoustic variability (Rost & McMurray, 2010), it is also possible that there is…

In this study we investigate young children's knowledge of syntactic constraints on Noun Phrase reference by testing 30-month-olds' interpretation of two types of transitive sentences. In a preferential looking task, we find that children prefer different interpretations for transitive sentences whose object NP is a name (e.g.,…

Many studies have examined language acquisition under morphosyntactic or semantic inconsistency, but few have considered "word-form" inconsistency. Many young learners encounter word-form inconsistency due to accent variation in their communities. The current study asked how preschoolers recognize accent-variants of newly learned words.…

To acquire the meanings of verbs, toddlers make use of the surrounding linguistic information. For example, 2-year-olds successfully acquire novel transitive verbs that appear in semantically rich frames containing content nouns ("The boy is gonna pilk a balloon"), but they have difficulty with pronominal frames ("He is gonna pilk…

Studying how children learn words in a foreign language can shed light on how language learning changes with development. In one experiment, we examined whether three-, four-, and five-year-olds could learn and remember words for familiar and unfamiliar objects in their native English and a foreign language. All age groups could learn and remember…

Toddlers' discrimination of native phonemic contrasts is generally unproblematic. Yet using those native contrasts in word learning and word recognition can be more challenging. In this article, we investigate perceptual versus phonological explanations for asymmetrical patterns found in early word recognition. We systematically investigated…

The early relationship between children's emerging articulatory abilities and their capacity to process speech input was investigated, following recent studies with English-learning infants. Twenty-six monolingual Italian-learning infants were tested at 6 months (no consistent and stable use of consonants, or vocal motor schemes [VMS]) and at…

How do children resolve the problem of indeterminacy when learning a new word? By one account, children adopt a "taxonomic assumption" and expect the word to denote only members of a particular taxonomic category. According to one version of this constraint, young children should represent polysemous words that label multiple kinds--for…

The goal of this study was to investigate the effects of prosodic stress patterns and semantic depth on word learning. Twelve preschool-aged children with typically developing speech and language skills participated in a word learning task. Novel words with either a trochaic or iambic prosodic pattern were embedded in one of two learning…

Highly abstract predicates (e.g. "think") present a number of difficulties for language learners (Gleitman et al., 2005). A partial solution to learning these verbs is that learners exploit regularities in the syntactic frames in which these verbs occur. While agreeing with this general approach to learning verbs, we caution that this…

Transitional Probability (TP) computations are regarded as a powerful learning mechanism that is functional early in development and has been proposed as an initial bootstrapping device for speech segmentation. However, a recent study casts doubt on the robustness of early statistical word-learning. Johnson and Tyler (2010) showed that when…

Children hear new words from many different talkers; to learn words most efficiently, they should be able to represent them independently of talker-specific pronunciation detail. However, do children know what the component sounds of words should be, and can they use that knowledge to deal with different talkers' phonetic realizations? Experiment…

This paper evaluates the proposal that general associative mechanisms underlie the earliest stages of word learning but that these same general mechanisms, operating over language input, enable children to identify domain-specific cues that ultimately help to constrain word learning, rendering children more sophisticated language users. As a…