From the second year of life, children with typical development (TD) demonstrate the ability to form word-word relations. However, this ability has received little attention in children with Down syndrome (DS). We investigated their ability to establish associative relationships between words that tend to occur in the same context. Two groups of…

Toddlerhood is marked by advances in several lexico-semantic skills, including improvements in the size and structure of the lexicon and increased efficiency in lexical processing. This project seeks to delineate how early changes in vocabulary size and vocabulary structure support lexical processing (Experiment 1), and how these three skills…

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…

When children hear a novel word in a context presenting a novel object and a familiar one, they usually assume that the novel word refers to the novel object. In a series of experiments, we tested whether this behavior would be found when 2-year-olds interpreted novel words that differed phonologically from familiar words in only 1 sound, either a…

Early in development, many word-learning phenomena generalize to symbolic gestures. The current study explored whether children avoid lexical overlap in the gestural modality, as they do in the verbal modality, within the context of ambiguous reference. Eighteen-month-olds' interpretations of words and symbolic gestures in a symbol-disambiguation…

Research suggests that nonlinguistic sequence learning abilities are an important contributor to language development (Conway, Bauernschmidt, Huang, & Pisoni, 2010). The current study investigated visual sequence learning (VSL) as a possible predictor of vocabulary development in infants. Fifty-eight 8.5-month-old infants were presented with a…

This research revealed both similarities and striking differences in early language proficiency among infants from a broad range of advantaged and disadvantaged families. English-learning infants ("n" = 48) were followed longitudinally from 18 to 24 months, using real-time measures of spoken language processing. The first goal was to…