Young children struggle more with mapping novel words onto relational referents (e.g., verbs) compared to non-relational referents (e.g., nouns). We present further evidence for this notion by investigating children's extensions of noun-noun compounds, which map onto combinations of non-relational referents, i.e., objects (e.g., "baby"…

The looking-while-listening (LWL) paradigm is frequently used to measure toddlers' lexical processing efficiency (LPE). Children's LPE is associated with vocabulary size, yet other linguistic, cognitive, or social skills contributing to LPE are not well understood. It also remains unclear whether LPE measures from two types of LWL trials…

Infants begin to understand some of the meanings of the adjective "good" at around thirteen months, but it is not clear when they start to map it to concepts in the moral domain. We investigated infants' and toddlers' knowledge of "good" in the domains of help and fairness. Participants at 20 and 30 months were shown computer…

Linguistic expressions of locative spatial relations in sign languages are mostly visually motivated representations of space involving mapping of entities and spatial relations between them onto the hands and the signing space. These are also morphologically complex forms. It is debated whether modality-specific aspects of spatial expressions…

Infants struggle to understand familiar words spoken in unfamiliar accents. Here, we examine whether accent exposure facilitates accent-specific adaptation. Two types of pre-exposure were examined: video-based (i.e., listening to pre-recorded stories; Experiment 1) and live interaction (reading books with an experimenter; Experiments 2 and 3).…

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…

We investigated 16- and 20-month-olds' flexibility in mapping phonotactically illegal words to objects. Using an associative word-learning task, infants were presented with a training phase that either highlighted or did not highlight the referential status of a novel label. Infants were then habituated to two novel objects, each paired with a…

Fast mapping weaknesses in children with specific language impairment (SLI) may be explained by differences in disambiguation, mapping an unknown word to an unnamed object. The impact of language ability and linguistic stimulus on disambiguation was investigated. Sixteen children with SLI (8 preschool, 8 school-age) and sixteen typically…

Neighbourhood Density (ND) and Phonotactic Probability (PP) influence word learning in children. This influence appears to change over development but the separate developmental trajectories of influence of PP and ND on word learning have not previously been mapped. This study examined the cross-sectional developmental trajectories of influence of…

Children's ability to learn and retain new words is fundamental to their vocabulary development. This study examined word retention in children learning a home language (L1) from birth and a second language (L2) in preschool settings. Participants were presented with sixteen novel words in L1 and in L2 and were tested for retention after…

The present study investigated whether children's representations of morphosyntactic information are abstract enough to guide early verb learning. Using an infant-controlled habituation paradigm with a switch design, Japanese-speaking children aged 1 ; 8 were habituated to two different events in which an object was engaging in an action. Each…

How do children develop the mapping between prosody and other levels of linguistic knowledge? This question has received considerable attention in child language research. In the present study two experiments were conducted to investigate four- to five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's sensitivity to prosody in ambiguity resolution. Experiment…

We assessed the effect of specificity of speaker information about an object on three-year-olds' word mappings. When children heard a novel label followed by specific information about an object at exposure, children subsequently mapped the label to that object at test. When children heard only specific information about an object at exposure,…

Previous studies show that young monolingual children's ability to "fast map" new word forms is closely associated with both their age and existing vocabulary knowledge. In this study we investigate potential relationships between age, fast mapping skills and existing vocabulary knowledge in both languages of developing bilingual preschool…

Explores "fast mapping," one of several processes that have been proposed to be involved in the rapid vocabulary expansion observed in the preschool years. An adaptation of a receptive word matching task examined how well children retained just-mapped relation between word and referent when some information was later missing. (Author/VWL)