Distribution of words across the first years of life: A longitudinal analysis of everyday language input to three English-learning infants.

Many in-lab studies have demonstrated that the distribution of word learning moments affects the strength and quality of word representations. How are words distributed in speech to children in their daily lives, and how is distribution related to other input characteristics? The present study analyzes transcripts of language input to English-learning infants from three longitudinal, naturalistic corpora captured between 6 and 39 months of age. To describe how word frequency varies across time, we calculated dispersion scores for all word types for each child.

Referent-oriented interactions in infancy: A naturalistic, longitudinal case study from an English-speaking household.

Caregivers use a of combination labeling, pointing, object grasping, and gaze to communicate with infants about referents in their environment. By two years of age, children reliably use these referent-oriented cues to communicate and learn. While there is some evidence from lab-based studies that younger infants attend to and use referent-oriented cues during communication, some more naturalistic studies have found that in the first year of life, infants do not robustly leverage these cues during dyadic interactions.

Moving beyond "nouns in the lab": Using naturalistic data to understand why infants' first words include uh-oh and hi.

Why do infants learn some words earlier than others? Many theories of early word learning focus on explaining how infants map labels onto concrete objects. However, words that are more abstract than object nouns, such as and , are typically among the first to appear in infants' vocabularies. We combined a behavioral experiment with naturalistic observational research to explore how infants learn and represent this understudied category of high-frequency, routine-based non-nouns, which we term "everyday words.

Adult beliefs about cognitive development vary across experience and expertise: A focus group study.

The purpose of this study was to explore North American adult beliefs and perspectives on how young children develop early cognitive, language, and word learning skills, and how these beliefs vary depending on experience and expertise. While there is a body of literature that uses questionnaires to assess beliefs about how children develop, traditional rating scales (e.g.

The map trap: Why and how word learning research should move beyond mapping.

A pervasive goal in the study of how children learn word meanings is to explain how young children solve the mapping problem. The mapping problem asks how language learners connect a label to its referent. Mapping is one part of word learning, however, it does not reflect other critical components of word meaning construction, such as the encoding of lexico-semantic relations and socio-pragmatic context.

Using a Developmental-Ecological Approach to Understand the Relation Between Language and Music.

Neurocognitive and genetic approaches have made progress in understanding language-music interaction in the adult brain. Although there is broad agreement that learning processes affect how we represent, comprehend, and produce language and music, there is little understanding of the content and dynamics of the early language-music environment in the first years of life. A developmental-ecological approach sees learning and development as fundamentally embedded in a child's environment, and thus requires researchers to move outside of the lab to understand what children are seeing, hearing, and doing in their daily lives.

Paradigmatic associations and individual variability in early lexical-semantic networks: Evidence from a free association task.

Between 6 and 9 years of age, children's free associations shift from syntagmatic to paradigmatic relationships. are words that are syntactically adjacent, thematically related (), or both; are words from the same grammatical class, taxonomic category , or both. Infant researchers have reliably found evidence for the activation of paradigmatic relationships by 24 months.

The publication gender gap in psychology.

Women are notably underrepresented in the academic sciences. Psychology is a pertinent case study of gender inequality in science, because women make up over three quarters of undergraduate and graduate students but only a third of all full professors. Here, publication records from 125 high-impact, peer-reviewed psychology journals are analyzed to describe nuanced patterns about how men and women contribute to research psychology.

2.5-year-olds' retention and generalization of novel words across short and long delays.

Two experiments investigated two-year-olds' retention and generalization of novel words across short and long time delays. Specifically, retention of newly learned words and generalization to novel exemplars or novel contexts were tested one minute or one week after learning. Experiment 1 revealed successful retention as well as successful generalization to both new exemplars and new contexts after a one-minute delay, with no statistical differences between retention and generalization performance for either generalization type.

Toddlers encode similarities among novel words from meaningful sentences.

Toddlers can learn about the meanings of individual words from the structure and semantics of the sentences in which they are embedded. However, it remains unknown whether toddlers encode similarities among novel words based on their positions within sentences. In three experiments, two-year-olds listened to novel words embedded in familiar sentence frames.

Toddlers Activate Lexical Semantic Knowledge in the Absence of Visual Referents: Evidence from Auditory Priming.

Language learners rapidly acquire extensive semantic knowledge, but the development of this knowledge is difficult to study, in part because it is difficult to assess young children's lexical semantic representations. In our studies, we solved this problem by investigating lexical semantic knowledge in 24-month-olds using the Head-turn Preference Procedure. In Experiment 1, looking times to a repeating spoken word stimulus (e.

The ontogeny of lexical networks: toddlers encode the relationships among referents when learning novel words.

Although the semantic relationships among words have long been acknowledged as a crucial component of adult lexical knowledge, the ontogeny of lexical networks remains largely unstudied. To determine whether learners encode relationships among novel words, we trained 2-year-olds on four novel words that referred to four novel objects, which were grouped into two visually similar pairs. Participants then listened to repetitions of word pairs (in the absence of visual referents) that referred to objects that were either similar or dissimilar to each other.

Remembering new words: integrating early memory development into word learning.

In order to successfully acquire a new word, young children must learn the correct associations between labels and their referents. For decades, word-learning researchers have explored how young children are able to form these associations. However, in addition to learning label-referent mappings, children must also remember them.