Linguistic contexts provide useful information about verb meanings by narrowing the space of candidate concepts. Intuitively, the more information, the better. For example, "the tall girl is 'fezzing,'" as compared to "the girl is fezzing," provides more information about which event, out of multiple candidate events, is being…

Adult humans process communicative interactions by recognizing that information is being communicated through speech (linguistic ability) and simultaneously evaluating how to respond appropriately (social-pragmatic ability). These abilities may originate in infancy. Infants understand how speech communicates in social interactions, helping them…

This study was designed to investigate the relationship between vocabulary size and the speed and accuracy of lexical processing in preschoolers between the ages of 30 and 46 months using an automatic eye tracking task based on the looking-while-listening paradigm (Fernald, Zangl, Portillo, & Marchman, 2008) and mispronunciation paradigm…