Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine if the Vocabulary Acquisition and Usage for Late Talkers (VAULT) intervention could be efficaciously applied to a new treatment target: words a child neither understood nor said. We also assessed whether the type of context variability used to encourage semantic learning (i.e., action or object)…

The fast pace and relative ease at which individuals with typical language acquire and use words belie the complexity and vulnerability of lexical representation development (i.e., word learning) and lexical-semantic processing. Lexical-semantic processing impairments are common in both developmental and acquired communication disorders and, even…

Children can acquire novel word meanings by using pragmatic cues. However, previous literature has frequently focused on in-the-moment word-to-meaning mappings, not delayed retention of novel vocabulary. Here, we examine how children use pragmatics as they learn and retain novel words. Thirty-three younger children (mean age: 5.0, range: 4.0-6.0,…

What is vision's role in driving early word production? To answer this, we assessed parent-report vocabulary questionnaires administered to congenitally blind children (N = 40, Mean age = 24 months [R: 7-57 months]) and compared the size and contents of their productive vocabulary to those of a large normative sample of sighted children (N =…

This dissertation articulates and defends a view about linguistic competence called 'variabilism'. According to variabilism, the epistemic demands of full linguistic competence vary in a particular way. More specifically, variabilism holds that different individual lexical application conditions (individually essential metaphysical ways of being…

Recent years have seen a flourishing of Natural Language Processing models that can mimic many aspects of human language fluency. These models harness a simple, decades-old idea: It is possible to learn a lot about word meanings just from exposure to language, because words similar in meaning are used in language in similar ways. The successes of…

Purpose: Late talkers (LTs) are a group of children who exhibit delays in language development without a known cause. Although a hallmark of LTs is a reduced expressive vocabulary, little is known about LTs' processing of semantic relations among words in their emerging vocabularies. This study uses an eye-tracking task to compare 2-year-old LTs'…

Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. This is "syntactic bootstrapping." A learner that uses syntactic bootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semantic information that a syntactic context provides. Based on the "semantic seed…

Many children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have a vocabulary deficit. One of the most effective interventions for increasing children's lexicon size is the semantic and phonological approach, an approach that has been used mainly with adolescents. The goals of our study are (1) to test whether the semantic-phonological approach…

Characteristics of vocabulary lists as well as study and test translation direction may affect the ease of learning second language (L2) vocabulary. We examined immediate and delayed test performance of first language (L1) English speakers learning a fixed set of L2 vocabulary placed on lists formed by crossing semantic relatedness (unrelated vs.…

Novel word learning and consolidation was studied in inexperienced language learners, to conceptually replicate and extend a similar study in experienced learners by Bakker, Takashima, Van Hell, Janzen, and McQueen (2015). Participants learned definitions for novel words on Day 1 and for another set of novel words on Day 2. Brain potentials…

The Mayan language Mam uses complex predicates to express events. Complex predicates map multiple semantic elements onto a single word, and consequently have a blend of lexical and phrasal features. The chameleon-like nature of complex predicates provides a window on children's ability to express phrasal combinations at the one-word stage of…

One of the fundamental questions in the field of language acquisition is a learnability problem, which considers how learners acquire certain aspects of language which are not directly provided in the input or whose referents are not readily observable. This dissertation investigates Japanese children's acquisition of various linguistic phenomena,…

We studied English-learning children's ability to learn the meanings of novel words from sentences containing truth-functional negation (Exp1) and to use the semantics of negation to inform word meaning (Exp2). In Exp1, 22-month-olds (n = 21) heard dialogues introducing a novel verb in either negative-transitive "("Mary didn't blick the…

This study aimed to establish normative data for 145 words using phonological and semantic association tasks with 242 French schoolchildren, ranging from ages 5 (Grande Section) to 8 (Cours Elémentaire 2), providing a fundamental resource for future research and educational planning. The participants were engaged in two primary tasks: a free…