In order to learn the mappings from words to referents, children must integrate co-occurrence information across individually ambiguous pairs of scenes and utterances, a challenge known as cross-situational word learning. In machine learning, recent multimodal neural networks have been shown to learn meaningful visual-linguistic mappings from…

Sound symbolism refers to non-arbitrary mappings between the sounds of words and their meanings and is often studied by pairing auditory pseudowords such as "maluma" and "takete" with rounded and pointed visual shapes, respectively. However, it is unclear what auditory properties of pseudowords contribute to their perception as…

Reading is an essential skill for daily life and academic success. According to the connectionist model of reading, word recognition involves orthographic, phonological, and semantic processing, as well as the interactions among them. Language skill such as phonological processing, develops earlier than reading acquisition, and thus likely serves…

Cross-situational word learning (XSWL) tasks present multiple words and candidate referents within a learning trial such that word-referent pairings can be inferred only across trials. Adults encode fine phonological detail when two words and candidate referents are presented in each learning trial (2 × 2 scenario; Escudero, Mulak, & Vlach,…

Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which people learn a particular item and the AoA effect refers to the phenomenon that early-acquired items are processed more quickly and accurately than those acquired later. Over several decades, the AoA effect has been investigated using neuroscientific, behavioral, corpus and computational…

The ability to predict future events in the environment and learn from them is a fundamental component of adaptive behavior across species. Here we propose that inferring predictions facilitates speech processing and word learning in the early stages of language development. Twelve- and 24-month olds' electrophysiological brain responses to heard…

This study investigated visual statistical learning (VSL) in 24 deaf signers and 24 hearing non-signers. Previous research with hearing individuals suggests that SL mechanisms support literacy. Our first goal was to assess whether VSL was associated with reading ability in deaf individuals, and whether this relation was sustained by a link between…

This study examined whether children use prosodic correlates to word meaning when interpreting novel words. For example, do children infer that a word spoken in a deep, slow, loud voice refers to something larger than a word spoken in a high, fast, quiet voice? Participants were 4- and 5-year-olds who viewed picture pairs that varied along a…

This study reports on the characteristics and distribution of naming errors of patients undergoing cortical stimulation mapping (CSM). During the procedure, electrical stimulation is used to induce temporary functional lesions and locate "essential" language areas for preservation. Under stimulation, patients are shown slides of common objects and…

This paper demonstrates systematic cross-linguistic differences in the electrophysiological correlates of conflicts between form and meaning ("semantic reversal anomalies"). These engender P600 effects in English and Dutch (e.g. [Kolk et al., 2003] and [Kuperberg et al., 2003]), but a biphasic N400--late positivity pattern in German (Schlesewsky…

Bilinguals' lexical mappings for their two languages have been found to converge toward a common naming pattern. The present paper investigates in more detail how semantic convergence is manifested in bilingual lexical knowledge. We examined how semantic convergence affects the centers and boundaries of lexical categories for common household…

When preparing to perform a task, the brain settles into task-set states which are relevant for the selection of the appropriate task-rules and stimulus-response mappings. The way this selection takes place within the Language domain is not well understood. We used high-density electrophysiological recordings while participants were engaged in a…

In 4 experiments, the authors addressed the mechanisms by which grammatical gender (in Italian and German) may come to affect meaning. In Experiments 1 (similarity judgments) and 2 (semantic substitution errors), the authors found Italian gender effects for animals but not for artifacts; Experiment 3 revealed no comparable effects in German. These…