Studies have investigated and proposed different potential influences on children's initial mappings of object words to referents. Each proposal is a variant on the idea that children use one source of evidence about the structure of word meanings or of grammar to discover other forms of structure, and in doing so they "bootstrap" their…

This study, an intra-cultural comparison among a Mestiza population in Central Mexico, was designed to investigate what the universal and culture-specific aspects of children's transition from sensorimotor to linguistic communication might be. (The culture-specific aspect was defined in this study as the degree to which caregivers provided…

Child acquisition of Mandarin was studied with four middle class families from Taipei, Taiwan. The 2-year-olds were taped at home playing with their families. Two of the children were taped for short periods (7 hours and 9 hours), while the other two children were studied biweekly for 14 months, which resulted in 71 hours of transcribed child…