What makes a word easy to learn? Early-learned words are frequent and tend to name concrete referents. But words typically do not occur in isolation. Some words are predictable from their contexts; others are less so. Here, we investigate whether predictability relates to when children start producing different words (age of acquisition; AoA). We…

Perceptual judgments result from a dynamic process, but little is known about the dynamics of number-line estimation. A recent study proposed a computational model that combined a model of trial-to-trial changes with a model for the internal scaling of discrete numbers. Here, we tested a surprising prediction of the model--a situation in which…

This study adjudicates between two opposing accounts of morphological productivity, using English past-tense as its test case. The single-route model (e.g., Bybee & Moder, 1983) posits that both regular and irregular past-tense forms are generated by analogy across stored exemplars in associative memory. In contrast, the dual-route model…

Language learning requires linguistic input, but several studies have found that knowledge of second language (L2) rules does not seem to improve with more language exposure (e.g., Johnson & Newport, 1989). One reason for this is that previous studies did not factor out variation due to the different rules tested. To examine this issue, we…

Looking is a fundamental exploratory behavior by which infants acquire knowledge about the world. In theories of infant habituation, however, looking as an exploratory behavior has been deemphasized relative to the reliable nature with which looking indexes active cognitive processing. We present a new theory that connects looking to the dynamics…

Older and younger adults' abilities to use context information rapidly during ambiguity resolution were investigated. In Experiments 1 and 2, younger and older adults heard ambiguous words (e.g., fires) in sentences where the preceding context supported either the less frequent or more frequent meaning of the word. Both age groups showed good…

Young children's failures in reasoning about beliefs and desires, and especially about false beliefs, have been much studied. However, there are few accounts of successful belief-desire reasoning in older children or adults. An exception to this is a model in which belief attribution is treated as a process wherein an inhibitory system selects the…