Children are adept at learning their language's speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, 2-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned…

Phonotactic patterns are generalizations that govern the order of consonants and vowels, within words and syllables. Certain second-order phonotactic patterns--those that relate multiple sounds within a syllable, such as "if the vowel is [near-close near-front unrounded vowel], then [s] can only appear at the end of the…

Beginning with the classic work of Shepard, Hovland, & Jenkins (1961), Type II visual patterns (e.g., exemplars are large white squares OR small black triangles) have held a special place in investigations of human learning. Recent research on Type II "linguistic" patterns has shown that they are relatively frequent across languages…

The acquisition of a sound system is an integral component of second language (L2) communication, yet it is one of the most difficult skills to teach and is therefore largely ignored in L2 classrooms (Derwing, 2010). In laboratory settings, phonetic training studies have typically examined syllables, rather than words, with no referential meaning.…

High frequency words have been suggested to benefit both speech segmentation and grammatical categorization of the words around them. Despite utilizing similar information, these tasks are usually investigated separately in studies examining learning. We determined whether including high frequency words in continuous speech could support…

Purpose: We investigated four theoretically based latent variable models of word learning in young school-age children. Method: One hundred sixty-seven English-speaking second graders with typical development from three U.S. states participated. They completed five different tasks designed to assess children's creation, storage, retrieval, and…

Accurate and rapid word recognition requires highly-specified phonological, orthographic, and semantic word-specific representations. It has been established that children acquire these representations through phonological decoding in a process known as orthographic learning. Studies examining orthographic learning and its predictors have thus far…