In this paper, we investigate the effect of neighbourhood density (ND) on vocabulary size in a computational model of vocabulary development. A word has a high ND if there are many words phonologically similar to it. High ND words are more easily learned by infants of all abilities (e.g. Storkel, 2009; Stokes, 2014). We present a neural network…

While children aged 1;10 and 2;1 show only a modest rate of mapping novel nouns onto unfamiliar rather than familiar objects, children aged 1;4 and 1;8 show a high rate. Two studies with young 2-year olds found the noun-mapping preference prevalent, but unless initial choices are strongly reinforced, increase in salience of familiar kinds lures…

This study investigated the role that agency information plays in children's early interpretations of grammatical aspect morphology, in particular, the progressive "-ing" and simple past forms. Fifty-nine children (two-, four- and five-year olds) were presented with a forced-choice sentence-to-scene matching task very similar to the one used by…

Investigated simple, appearance-predicted, and reality-predicted labelling in 36 3-, 4-, and 5-year olds. An age-related appearance-reality shift was observed in simple labelling. It is argued that younger children maintained the one-label-per-predicate pattern because of inflexible encoding; older children did so because of better understanding…