Early Verb-Action and Noun-Object Mapping Across Sensory Modalities: A Neuro-Developmental View.

The authors provide an alternative to the traditional view that verbs are harder to learn than nouns by reviewing three lines of behavioral and neurophysiological evidence in word-mapping development across cultures. First, preverbal infants tune into word-action and word-object pairings using domain-general mechanisms. Second, while post-verbal infants from noun-friendly language environments experience verb-action mapping difficulty, infants from verb-friendly language environments do not.

Word learning in deaf children with cochlear implants: effects of early auditory experience.

Word-learning skills were tested in normal-hearing 12- to 40-month-olds and in deaf 22- to 40-month-olds 12 to 18 months after cochlear implantation. Using the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm (IPLP), children were tested for their ability to learn two novel-word/novel-object pairings. Normal-hearing children demonstrated learning on this task at approximately 18 months of age and older.

Contending with foreign accent in early word learning.

By their second birthday, children are beginning to map meaning to form with relative ease. One challenge for these developing abilities is separating information relevant to word identity (i.e.

Invariance detection within an interactive system: a perceptual gateway to language development.

In this article, we hypothesize that invariance detection, a general perceptual phenomenon whereby organisms attend to relatively stable patterns or regularities, is an important means by which infants tune in to various aspects of spoken language. In so doing, we synthesize a substantial body of research on detection of regularities across the domains of speech perception, word segmentation, word-referent mapping, and grammar learning. In addition, we outline our framework for how invariance detection might serve as a perceptual gateway to more sophisticated communication by providing a foundation for subsequent emergent capacities.

Comparing infants' preference for correlated audiovisual speech with signal-level computational models.

How much of infant behaviour can be accounted for by signal-level analyses of stimuli? The current paper directly compares the moment-by-moment behaviour of 8-month-old infants in an audiovisual preferential looking task with that of several computational models that use the same video stimuli as presented to the infants. One type of model utilizes only signal-level properties of visual motion whereas the other adds audiovisual integration (either through correlation or instantaneous addition of audio and visual signals). Together these models account for a significant portion of the variance in infant looking.

Young children associate novel words with complex objects rather than salient parts.

How do children learn associations between novel words and complex perceptual displays? Using a visual preference procedure, the authors tested 12- and 19-month-olds to see whether the infants would associate a novel word with a complex 2-part object or with either of that object's parts, both of which were potentially objects in their own right and 1 of which was highly salient to infants. At both ages, children's visual fixation times during test were greater to the entire complex object than to the salient part (Experiment 1) or to the less salient part (Experiment 2)--when the original label was requested. Looking times to the objects were equal if a new label was requested or if neutral audio was used during training (Experiment 3).

Combining techniques to reveal emergent effects in infants' segmentation, word learning, and grammar.

This paper provides three representative examples that highlight the ways in which procedures can be combined to study interactions across traditional domains of study: segmentation, word learning, and grammar. The first section uses visual familiarization prior to the Headturn Preference Procedure to demonstrate that synchronized visual information aids in speech segmentation in noise. The second section uses audio familiarization prior to the Preferential Looking Procedure to demonstrate that speech perception aids in the learning of meaning.

Infants' use of synchronized visual information to separate streams of speech.

In 4 studies, 7.5-month-olds used synchronized visual-auditory correlations to separate a target speech stream when a distractor passage was presented at equal loudness. Infants succeeded in a segmentation task (using the head-turn preference procedure with video familiarization) when a video of the talker's face was synchronized with the target passage (Experiment 1, N = 30).

An Emerging Consensus: Younger and Cohen Revisited.

From Aesop to Sun Tzu, the importance of working together has long been acknowledged. Yet as long as cooperation has existed, so have the difficulties associated with it. Pooling two fields might mean twice the power, but this union also brings twice the jargon, twice the competing theories, and twice the head butting.