Within a language, there is considerable variation in the pronunciations of words owing to social factors like age, gender, nationality, and race. In the present study, we investigate whether toddlers link social and linguistic variation during word learning. In Experiment 1, 24- to 26-month-old toddlers were exposed to two talkers whose front…

Preschool children's use of decontextualized language, or talk about abstract topics beyond the here-and-now, is predictive of their kindergarten readiness and is associated with the frequency of parents' own use of decontextualized language. Does a brief, parent-focused intervention conveying the importance of decontextualized language cause…

Used point-light displays (lights corresponding to the joints of the human body) to examine 3-year-olds' understanding of verbs. Found that children could extend familiar motion verbs (walking, dancing) to videotaped point-light actions shown in an intermodal preferential looking paradigm. Children watched the action matching the requested verb…

The purpose of this study was to replicate the "basic training" structural model in Patterson's (1982) coercion theory, extending its scope to single-mother families with younger (six- to eight-year-old) boys. Significance of the successful replication was seen to lie in implications for the generalizability of the model across family…

Three studies investigated 3-year-olds' comprehension of indirectly and directly learned words after a 2-day delay. Found indirectly and directly learned proper and common names resulted in proper name mappings that picked out individual and common name mappings that could be extended to another category member. When additional, sometimes…