Infants' early communicative repertoires include both words and symbolic gestures. The current study examined the extent to which infants organize words and gestures in a single unified lexicon. As a window into lexical organization, eighteen-month-olds' ("N" = 32) avoidance of word-gesture overlap was examined and compared with…

Recent research demonstrated that although 24-month-old infants do well on the initial pairing of a novel word and novel object in fast-mapping tasks, they are unable to retain the mapping after a 5 min delay. The current study examines the role of familiarity with the objects and words on infants' ability to bridge between the initial fast…

This study was designed to examine whether infants acquiring languages that place a differential emphasis on nouns and verbs, focus their attention on motions or objects in the presence of a novel word. An infant-controlled habituation paradigm was used to teach 18- to 20-month-old English-, French-, and Japanese-speaking infants' novel words for…

It has long been thought that the prefrontal cortex, as the seat of most higher brain functions, is functionally silent during most of infancy. This review highlights recent work concerned with the precise mapping (localization) of brain activation in human infants, providing evidence that prefrontal cortex exhibits functional activation much…

Research suggests that nonlinguistic sequence learning abilities are an important contributor to language development (Conway, Bauernschmidt, Huang, & Pisoni, 2010). The current study investigated visual sequence learning (VSL) as a possible predictor of vocabulary development in infants. Fifty-eight 8.5-month-old infants were presented with a…

Statistical learning mechanisms play an important role in theories of language acquisition and processing. Recurrent neural network models have provided important insights into how these mechanisms might operate. We examined whether such networks capture two key findings in human statistical learning. In Simulation 1, a simple recurrent network…

Previous research using the name-based categorization task has shown that 20-month-old infants can simultaneously learn 2 words that only differ by 1 consonantal feature but fail to do so when the words only differ by 1 vocalic feature. This asymmetry was taken as evidence for the proposal that consonants are more important than vowels at the…

When addressing infants, many adults adopt a particular type of speech, known as infant-directed speech (IDS). IDS is characterized by exaggerated intonation, as well as reduced speech rate, shorter utterance duration, and grammatical simplification. It is commonly asserted that IDS serves in part to facilitate language learning. Although…

We assessed 19-month-olds' appreciation of the conventional nature of object labels versus desires. Infants played a finding game with an experimenter who stated her intention to find the referent of a novel word (word group), to find an object she wanted (desire group), or simply to look in a box (control group). A 2nd experimenter then…