This paper investigates whether typical stress patterns in English nouns and verbs are available as a prosodic cue for categorisation and accelerated word learning during first language acquisition. The stress typicality hypothesis states that left-stressed nouns and right-stressed verbs should be acquired earlier than the reverse configurations…

One strategy that children might use to sort words into grammatical categories such as noun and verb is distributional bootstrapping, in which local co-occurrence information is used to distinguish between categories. Words that can be used in more than one grammatical category could be problematic for this approach. Using naturalistic corpus…

Two studies examined the role of phonological cues in the lexical categorization of new words when children could also rely on learning by exclusion and whether the role of phonology depends on extensive experience with a language. Phonological cues were assessed via phonological typicality--an aggregate measure of the relationship between the…

Data from 48 infants revealed (1) that infants aged 1;2-2;3 failed to establish a stable word-object link even in follow-in labeling and (2) that only infants aged 1;6-1;7 could identify the correct referent during discrepant labeling. During the period between 1;2-1;7 infants are becoming increasingly adept at acquiring new labels under minimal…

This study investigates the role of phonological and morphological information in children's developing orthographies in two languages with different linguistic typologies: Hebrew, a Semitic language with a highly synthetic morphology, and Dutch, a Germanic language with a sparse morphology. 192 Israeli and 192 Belgian monolingual schoolchildren…