Questions about early word knowledge pervade the literature on both typical and atypical language trajectories. To determine which words an infant knows, researchers have relied on two types of measures--caregiver-report and eye-gaze behavior. When these measures are compared, however, their results frequently fail to converge, making it difficult…

Two experiments explore children's spontaneous labeling of novel objects as a method to study early lexical access. The experiments also provide new evidence on children's attention to object shape when labeling objects. In Experiment 1, the spontaneous productions of 21 23- to 28-month-olds (mean 26;28) shown a set of novel, unnamed objects were…

Speech directed towards young children ("motherese") is subject to consistent systematic modifications. Recent research suggests that gesture directed towards young children is similarly modified (gesturese). It has been suggested that gesturese supports speech, therefore scaffolding communicative development (the facilitative…