Cross-situational word learning, the ability to decipher word-referent links over multiple ambiguous learning events, has been documented across development and proposed to be key to vocabulary acquisition. However, this work has largely focused on learning from one-to-one structure, where each referent is consistently linked with a single label.…

Although children may productively use concrete nouns after limited exposure, complete mastery of adult-like patterns of noun usage can take up to 14 years. We evaluated whether a transition from universal to language-specific naming is part of the refinement in later lexical development, and we compared how this refinement plays out in…

Usage patterns for common nouns continue to change well past the early years of language acquisition in free naming (Andersen, 1975; Ameel, Malt, & Storms, 2008). The current research evaluates whether this continued evolution is shown in receptive judgments as well, given their differing cognitive demands. We found an extended learning…