In a preferential looking paradigm, we studied how children's looking behavior and pupillary response were modulated by the degree of phonological mismatch between the correct label of a target referent and its manipulated form. We manipulated degree of mismatch by introducing one or more featural changes to the target label. Both looking behavior…

Infants begin to understand some of the meanings of the adjective "good" at around thirteen months, but it is not clear when they start to map it to concepts in the moral domain. We investigated infants' and toddlers' knowledge of "good" in the domains of help and fairness. Participants at 20 and 30 months were shown computer…

Children pay more attention to the beginnings and ends of sentences rather than the middle. In natural speech, ends of sentences are prosodically and segmentally enhanced; they are also privileged by sensory and recall advantages. We contrasted whether acoustic enhancement or sensory and recall-related advantages are necessary and sufficient for…

This study investigates whether the earliest words children choose to say are mainly words containing sounds they can produce (cf. 'phonological dominance' hypotheses), or whether children choose words without regard to their phonological characteristics (cf. 'lexical dominance' hypotheses). Phonological properties of words in spontaneous speech…

Young children are conservative when extending novel verbs to novel exemplars. We investigated whether multiple, simultaneously presented exemplars would aid young children's verb learning, as well as the importance of exemplar variability. Three-year-olds were taught novel verbs, while viewing either one action-scene featuring a novel action…

Responsive parental communication during an infant's first year has been positively associated with later language outcomes. This study explores responsivity in mother-infant communication by modeling how change in guiding language between 7 and 11 months influences toddler vocabulary development. In a group of 32 mother-child dyads, change in…

In languages with evidential marking, utterances consist of an informational content and a specification of the mode of access to that information. In this first longitudinal study investigating the acquisition of the Turkish evidential marker "-mIs" in naturalistic child-caregiver interactions, we examined six children between 8 and 36…

Valid indigenous language assessments are needed to further our understanding of how children learn language around the world. We assessed the psychometric properties and performance of two caregiver-report measures of Wolof language skill (language milestones achieved and vocabulary knowledge) for 500 children (ages 0;4 to 2;6) living in rural…

Vocabulary input frequency influences age of acquisition, and is also an essential control for investigating the influence of other factors. We propose a new method of frequency estimation, self-report. 918 Danish-speaking parents of 12-36-month-old children estimated their frequency of use of 725 words. Self-report was substantially correlated…

This study compared the temporal measurements of stop consonants in 29 three- to six-year-old Mandarin-speaking children and 12 Mandarin-speaking adults. Each participant produced 18 Mandarin disyllabic words which contained six stop consonants /p, p?, t, t?, k, k?/ each followed by three vowels /a, i, u/ at the word-initial position in the first…

We explored whether supported (SJE) or coordinated joint engagement (CJE) between mothers recruited from the community and their 24-month-old children who were slow-to-talk at 18 months old were associated with child language scores at ages 24, 36, and 48 months (n = 197). We further explored whether SJE or CJE modifed the concurrent positive…

The contribution of parent input to children's subsequent expressive verb diversity was explored in twenty typically developing toddlers with small verb lexicons. Child developmental factors and parent input measures (i.e. verb quantity, verb diversity, and verb-related structural cues) at age 1;9 were examined as potential predictors of…

This study examined the development of and possible predictors of interrogative forms and functions in early childhood Mandarin. All the interrogatives drawn from the Early Child Mandarin Corpus (168 children 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, and 5;6) were analyzed. The main results indicated that (i) there were significant age effects in interrogative forms and…

While recent studies suggest children can use cross-situational information to learn words, these studies involved minimal referential ambiguity, and the cross-situational evidence overwhelmingly favored a single referent for each word. Here we asked whether 2-5-year-olds could identify a noun's referent when the scene and cross-situational…

To better understand how toddlers integrate multiple learning strategies to acquire verbs, we compared sensorimotor recruitment and comparison learning because both strategies are thought to boost children's access to scene-level information. For sensorimotor recruitment, we tested having toddlers use dolls as agents and compared this strategy…