NotesFAQContact Us
Collection
Advanced
Search Tips
Education Level
Higher Education1
Audience
Laws, Policies, & Programs
What Works Clearinghouse Rating
Showing all 14 results Save | Export
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Ansgar D. Endress – Developmental Science, 2024
In many domains, learners extract recurring units from continuous sequences. For example, in unknown languages, fluent speech is perceived as a continuous signal. Learners need to extract the underlying words from this continuous signal and then memorize them. One prominent candidate mechanism is statistical learning, whereby learners track how…
Descriptors: Syllables, Brain Hemisphere Functions, Diagnostic Tests, Memory
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Barrón-Martínez, Julia B.; Arias-Trejo, Natalia; Salvador-Cruz, Judith – International Journal of Disability, Development and Education, 2022
From the second year of life, children with typical development (TD) demonstrate the ability to form word-word relations. However, this ability has received little attention in children with Down syndrome (DS). We investigated their ability to establish associative relationships between words that tend to occur in the same context. Two groups of…
Descriptors: Down Syndrome, Language Acquisition, Language Skills, Young Children
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Feng, Ye; Kager, René; Lai, Regine; Wong, Patrick C. M. – Developmental Psychology, 2022
The ability to map similar sounding words to different meanings alone is far from enough for successful speech processing. To overcome variability in the speech signal, young learners must also recognize words across surface variations. Previous studies have shown that infants at 14 months are able to use variations in word-internal cues (i.e.,…
Descriptors: Infants, Developmental Stages, Phonology, Intonation
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Valente, Daniela; Ferré, Pilar; Soares, Ana; Rato, Anabela; Comesaña, Montserrat – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2018
Very few studies exist on the role of cross-language similarities in cognate word acquisition. Here we sought to explore, for the first time, the interplay of orthography (O) and phonology (P) during the early stages of cognate word acquisition, looking at children and adults with the same level of foreign language proficiency and by using two…
Descriptors: Phonology, Language Processing, Second Language Learning, Native Language
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Hills, Thomas – Journal of Child Language, 2013
Does child-directed language differ from adult-directed language in ways that might facilitate word learning? Associative structure (the probability that a word appears with its free associates), contextual diversity, word repetitions and frequency were compared longitudinally across six language corpora, with four corpora of language directed at…
Descriptors: Child Language, Computational Linguistics, Language Acquisition, Word Frequency
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
MacKenzie, Heather K.; Graham, Susan A.; Curtin, Suzanne; Archer, Stephanie L. – Developmental Psychology, 2014
We explored 12-month-olds' flexibility in accepting phonotactically illegal or ill-formed word forms in a modified associative-learning task. Sixty-four English-learning infants were presented with a training phase that either clarified the purpose of a sound--object association task or left the task ambiguous. Infants were then habituated to sets…
Descriptors: Infants, Language Acquisition, English, Slavic Languages
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Rabagliati, Hugh; Pylkkanen, Liina; Marcus, Gary F. – Developmental Psychology, 2013
Language is rife with ambiguity. Do children and adults meet this challenge in similar ways? Recent work suggests that while adults resolve syntactic ambiguities by integrating a variety of cues, children are less sensitive to top-down evidence. We test whether this top-down insensitivity is specific to syntax or a general feature of children's…
Descriptors: Ambiguity (Semantics), Syntax, Psycholinguistics, Infants
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Cordier, Francoise; Croizet, Jean-Claude; Rigalleau, Francois – Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2013
We analyzed the differential processing of nouns and verbs in a lexical decision task. Moderate and high-frequency nouns and verbs were compared. The characteristics of our material were specified at the formal level (number of letters and syllables, number of homographs, orthographic neighbors, frequency and age of acquisition), and at the…
Descriptors: Semantics, Verbs, Nouns, Comparative Analysis
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Havy, Melanie; Bertoncini, Josiane; Nazzi, Thierry – Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2011
Consonants and vowels have been shown to play different relative roles in different processes, including retrieving known words from pseudowords during adulthood or simultaneously learning two phonetically similar pseudowords during infancy or toddlerhood. The current study explores the extent to which French-speaking 3- to 5-year-olds exhibit a…
Descriptors: Phonetics, Vowels, Task Analysis, Vocabulary Development
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Nitschke, Sanjo; Kidd, Evan; Serratrice, Ludovica – Language and Cognitive Processes, 2010
The present study investigated L1 transfer effects in L2 sentence processing and syntactic priming through comprehension in speakers of German and Italian. L1 and L2 speakers of both languages participated in a syntactic priming experiment that aimed to shift their preferred interpretation of ambiguous relative clause constructions. The results…
Descriptors: Second Language Learning, Transfer of Training, Language Processing, Language Acquisition
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Mayor, Julien; Plunkett, Kim – Psychological Review, 2010
We present a neurocomputational model with self-organizing maps that accounts for the emergence of taxonomic responding and fast mapping in early word learning, as well as a rapid increase in the rate of acquisition of words observed in late infancy. The quality and efficiency of generalization of word-object associations is directly related to…
Descriptors: Generalization, Vocabulary Development, Classification, Language Acquisition
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Whitney, Carin; Weis, Susanne; Krings, Timo; Huber, Walter; Grossman, Murray; Kircher, Tilo – Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2009
Functional imaging studies of single word production have consistently reported activation of the lateral prefrontal and cingulate cortex. Its contribution has been shown to be sensitive to task demands, which can be manipulated by the degree of response specification. Compared with classical verbal fluency, free word association relies less on…
Descriptors: Semantics, Reading Processes, Language Acquisition, Semiotics
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Fennell, Christopher T.; Werker, Janet F. – Language and Speech, 2003
Several recent studies from our laboratory have shown that 14-month-old infants have difficulty learning to associate two phonetically similar new words to two different objects when tested in the Switch task. Because the infants can discriminate the same phonetic detail that they fail to use in the associative word-learning situation, we have…
Descriptors: Phonetics, Infants, Child Development, Language Acquisition
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Tomasello, Michael – Journal of Child Language, 1987
Study of a one-year-old's earliest use of prepositions found that spatial oppositions ("up-down") were learned first, and used in non-prepositional senses prior to prepositional usage. "With,""by,""to,""for,""at," and "of" were learned later and used to express case relationships and more often misused and omitted than the earlier-learned…
Descriptors: Associative Learning, Case Studies, Child Language, Cognitive Processes