Bilingual infants acquire languages in a variety of language environments. Some caregivers follow a one-person-one-language approach in an attempt to not "confuse" their child. However, the central assumption that infants can keep track of what language a person speaks has not been tested. In two studies, we tested whether bilingual and…

Associative word learning, the ability to pair a concept to a word, is an essential mechanism for early language development. One common method by which researchers measure this ability is the Switch task (Werker, Cohen, Lloyd, Casasola, & Stager, 1998), wherein infants are habituated to 2 word-object pairings and then tested on their ability…

Do children learn a new word by tracking co-occurrences between words and referents across multiple instances ("cross-situational learning" models), or is word-learning a "one-track" process, where learners maintain a single hypothesis about the possible referent, which may be verified or falsified in future occurrences…

Purpose: This article aims to describe how exemplar variability can manipulate the word learning environment to maximize within- and cross-language generalization in Spanish--English bilinguals. Furthermore, we examined sources of individual variability that predicted word learning. Method: Nineteen Spanish--English bilingual children participated…

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…

Children growing up bilingual face a unique linguistic environment. The current study investigated whether early bilingual experience influences the developmental trajectory of associative word learning, a foundational mechanism for lexical acquisition. Monolingual and bilingual infants (N = 98) were tested on their ability to learn…

In two experiments, the use of mutual exclusivity in the naming of whole objects was examined in monolingual and bilingual 3- and 6-year-olds. Once an object has a known name, then via principles of mutual exclusivity it is often assumed that a new name given to the object must refer to some part, substance, or other property of the object.…

Analysis of the responses of monolingual Dutch and bilingual Turkish, Moroccan, and Surinamese children living in the Netherlands to word association and sorting tasks revealed no significant differences among the groups. Results of the study indicated that bilingualism does not affect cognitive-linguistic development. (22 references) (Author/VWL)