Previous research indicates that monolingual infants have difficulty learning minimal pairs (i.e., words differing by one phoneme) produced by a speaker uncharacteristic of their language environment and that bilinguals might share this difficulty. To clearly reveal infants' underlying phonological representations, we minimized task demands by…

Children with autism often use newly acquired language in restricted contexts and with limited variability. Instructional tactics that embed generalization technology have shown promise for increasing spontaneity, response variation, and the generalized use of language across settings, people, and materials. In this study, we explored the…

This dissertation will focus on the processing and learning of abstract, phrasal argument structure constructions. Chapter 1 provides the theoretical framework for abstract constructions, and illustrates the importance of such representations in speakers' linguistic knowledge. Chapter 2 reviews the evidence for meaning being associated with…

The present research explores young children's extension of novel labels to novel animate items. Three experiments were performed by means of the intermodal preferential looking (IPL) paradigm. In Experiment 1, after repeated exposure to novel word-object associations, 24- and 36-month-olds extend novel labels on the basis of shape similarity, in…

Two experiments examined infants' reliance on object shape versus color for word generalization to animate and inanimate objects. Infants were taught labels for either novel vehicles or novel animals using preferential-looking procedure or an interactive procedure. Results of both experiments indicated that infants limited their word…

Tested a normally developing child several times between 16 and 27 months of age for his ability to derive the relations between stimuli. Found that the child derived "mutual entailment" relations and showed "nonverbal exclusion" as early as 17 months. "Combinatorial entailment" relations and "verbal…