This study investigated the developmental trajectories of three perceptual domains related to regional dialect competence: the linguistic domain, tested through an intelligibility in noise task; the objective indexical domain, tested through locality judgments and a free classification task; and the subjective indexical domain, tested through…

How do children resolve the problem of indeterminacy when learning a new word? By one account, children adopt a "taxonomic assumption" and expect the word to denote only members of a particular taxonomic category. According to one version of this constraint, young children should represent polysemous words that label multiple kinds--for…

The present study investigates English-learning infants' early understanding of the link between the grammatical category "verb" and the conceptual category "event," and their ability to recruit morphosyntactic information online to learn novel verb meanings. We report two experiments using an infant-controlled…

In this experiment using the conditioned head-turn procedure, 18-month-old French-learning toddlers were trained to respond to either a target noun ("la balle"/"the ball") or a target verb ("je mange"/"I ea"t). They were then tested on target word recognition in two syntactic contexts: the target word was…

Highly abstract predicates (e.g. "think") present a number of difficulties for language learners (Gleitman et al., 2005). A partial solution to learning these verbs is that learners exploit regularities in the syntactic frames in which these verbs occur. While agreeing with this general approach to learning verbs, we caution that this…