Comparing child word associations to adult associative norms: Evidence for child-specific associations with a strong priming effect in 3-year-olds.

Investigating how infants first establish relationships between words is a necessary step towards understanding how an interconnected network of semantic relationships develops in the adult lexical-semantic system. Stimuli selection for these child studies is critical since words must be both familiar and highly imageable. However, there has been a reliance on adult word association norms to inform stimuli selection in English infant studies to date, as no resource currently exists for child-specific word associations.

Adapting language development research paradigms to online testing: Data from preferential looking, word learning and vocabulary assessment in toddlers.

During the recent pandemic, it became necessary to adapt lab-based studies to online experiments. To investigate the impact of online testing on the quality of data, we focus on three paradigms widely used in infant research: a word recognition task using the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm, a word learning task using the Switch task, and a language assessment tool (WinG) where children identify a target word amongst a set of picture cards. Our results for synchronous and asynchronous studies provide support for the robustness of online testing.

Vowels and consonants matter equally to British English-learning 11-month-olds' familiar word form recognition.

While adult studies show that consonants are more important than vowels in lexical processing tasks, the developmental trajectory of this consonant bias varies cross-linguistically. This study tested whether British English-learning 11-month-old infants' recognition of familiar word forms is more reliant on consonants than vowels, as found by Poltrock and Nazzi (2015) in French. After establishing that infants prefer listening to a list of familiar words over pseudowords (Experiment 1), Experiment 2 examined preference for consonant versus vowel mispronunciations of these words.

Promoting early language development in the Arab world and Sustainable Development Goals 3, 4, 10 and 17.

Purpose: This commentary describes a multi-national project which addresses gaps in the design and delivery of health and education services in Arabic-speaking countries in relation to early language development, with a focus on Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories. This includes: (1) co-production with early years professionals and NGOs of approaches to support early language development; (2) development and standardisation of tools to identify monolingual and multilingual Arabic-speaking children at risk of poor language development; and (3) examination of language development in refugee communities.

Result: The importance of inter-professional partnership and the inclusion of families in planning support for oral language development is highlighted.

Tracking the associative boost in infancy.

Do words that are both associatively and taxonomically related prime each other in the infant mental lexicon? We explore the impact of these semantic relations in the emerging lexicon. Using the head-turn preference procedure, we show that 18-month-old infants have begun to construct a semantic network of associatively and taxonomically related words, such as dog-cat or apple-cheese. We demonstrate that priming between words is longer-lasting when the relationship is both taxonomic and associative, as opposed to purely taxonomic, reflecting the associative boost reported in the adult priming literature.