Children achieve better long-term language outcomes than adults. However, it remains unclear whether children actually learn language "more quickly" than adults during real-time exposure to input--indicative of true superior language learning abilities--or whether this advantage stems from other factors. To examine this issue, we…

Previous studies show that linguistic information and talker information interact during processing. Familiarity with a language facilitates talker processing, and familiarity with a talker's voice facilitates linguistic processing. To probe the factors involved in talker processing, researchers examined how individual differences in reading…

Codeswitching is a common feature of bilingual language practices, yet its impact on word learning is poorly understood. Critically, processing costs associated with codeswitching may extend to learning. Moreover, verbs tend to be more difficult to learn than nouns, and the challenges of learning verbs could compound with processing costs…

Background & aims: Throughout typical development, children prioritize different perceptual, social, and linguistic cues to learn words. The earliest acquired words are often those that are perceptually salient and highly imageable. Imageability, the ease in which a word evokes a mental image, is a strong predictor for word age of acquisition…

From the second year of life, children with typical development (TD) demonstrate the ability to form word-word relations. However, this ability has received little attention in children with Down syndrome (DS). We investigated their ability to establish associative relationships between words that tend to occur in the same context. Two groups of…

The looking-while-listening (LWL) paradigm is frequently used to measure toddlers' lexical processing efficiency (LPE). Children's LPE is associated with vocabulary size, yet other linguistic, cognitive, or social skills contributing to LPE are not well understood. It also remains unclear whether LPE measures from two types of LWL trials…

Vocabulary knowledge and speed of lexical access are early components of linguistic skill that co-develop rapidly in the first two years of life. Evidence suggests that these components are foundational for downstream linguistic and cognitive skills and that early individual differences set the stage for a developmental cascade throughout the…

In typical development, listeners can use semantic content of verbs to facilitate incremental language processing--a skill that is associated with existing language skills. Studies of children with ASD have not identified an association between incremental language processing in semantically-constraining contexts and language skills, perhaps…

The current study investigated language development of children residing in institutional care (IC) in Russia, compared to peers raised by biological family care (BFC). We used standardized behavioral testing (Preschool Language Scale-5, McArthur CDI), and an event-related potential picture-word matching paradigm. Children in IC significantly…

Toddlerhood is marked by advances in several lexico-semantic skills, including improvements in the size and structure of the lexicon and increased efficiency in lexical processing. This project seeks to delineate how early changes in vocabulary size and vocabulary structure support lexical processing (Experiment 1), and how these three skills…

Purpose: This study investigated component skills in oral language development utilizing and validating a new assessment battery in a large (N = 800) and representative sample of Greek students 4-7 years of age. Method: All participants enrolled in public schools from four geographical regions (Attica, Thessaly, Macedonia, and Crete) that varied…

Purpose: The study examined the effects of imageability and phonological neighborhood density on the acquisition of word production in Czech, controlling for part-of-speech class, word length, and word frequency. Phonological neighborhood density is of interest because previous research has not examined highly inflected languages such as Czech.…

Oral language abilities have been reported to be related to reading development. This relationship seems to be determined by orthographic systems and reading development. Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) show reading difficulties, although most studies focus on reading comprehension. The present study has two main objectives: to…

The ability to map similar sounding words to different meanings alone is far from enough for successful speech processing. To overcome variability in the speech signal, young learners must also recognize words across surface variations. Previous studies have shown that infants at 14 months are able to use variations in word-internal cues (i.e.,…

Linguistic contexts provide useful information about verb meanings by narrowing the space of candidate concepts. Intuitively, the more information, the better. For example, "the tall girl is 'fezzing,'" as compared to "the girl is fezzing," provides more information about which event, out of multiple candidate events, is being…