Most language use is displaced, referring to past, future, or hypothetical events, posing the challenge of how children learn what words refer to when the referent is not physically available. One possibility is that iconic cues that imagistically evoke properties of absent referents support learning when referents are displaced. In an…

Recent studies have found that infants show relational learning in the first year. Like older children, they can abstract relations such as "same" or "different" across a series of exemplars. For older children, language has a major impact on relational learning: labeling a shared relation facilitates learning, while labeling…

Research on the development of children's decontextualized language has focused primarily on their references to events displaced in time. Here, we examine children's early emerging ability to talk about individuals who are elsewhere and therefore not participating in the conversation. We analyzed the references made by three Mandarin-speaking…

The article observes studies of word categorization in 3- to 4-months-old infants questioning their main conclusion that young infants may categorize words themselves. The review shows that there is no bilateral communication between them and adults as well as any perceptual interaction that can help infants acquire language. And yet language…

The following manuscript is a review of research surrounding best practices for language and literacy development in children birth to age three. Part 1 of the review begins with the research on language acquisition beginning in utero, continuing through infancy and onto the emergence of speech. The review discusses the importance of language…