If a child asks a friend to play football and the friend replies, 'I have a cough', the requesting child must make a 'relevance inference' to determine the communicative intent. Relevance inferencing is a key component of pragmatics, that is, the ability to integrate social context into language interpretation and use. We tested which cognitive…

Parent-child interaction plays a crucial role in early language acquisition. In young typically developing children, direct and indirect relationships between parent gesture, child gesture and child language have been observed. Far less is known about these relationships in atypical language development. The present study investigated parent…

When young children interpret novel nouns, they tend to be very much affected by the perceptual features of the referent objects, especially shape. This article investigates whether children might inhibit a prepotent tendency to base novel nouns on the shape of referent objects in order to base them on conceptual features (i.e. taxonomic object…

In controlled contexts, young children find it more difficult to learn novel words for actions than words for objects: Imai et al. found that English-speaking three-year-olds mistakenly choose a novel object as a referent for a novel verb about 42% of the time despite hearing the verb in a transitive sentence. The current two studies investigated…

Disambiguation refers to children's tendency to assign novel labels to unfamiliar rather than familiar referents. It is employed as a word-learning strategy, but it remains unknown whether it is a domain-specific phenomenon or a manifestation of more general pragmatic competence. To assess the domain-specificity and development of disambiguation,…

This study examines whether books that contain personalized content are better facilitators of young children's word acquisition than books which are not personalized for a child. In a repeated-measures experimental design, 18 children (mean age 3;10) were read a picture book which contained both personalized and non-personalized sections, with…