Touch cues might facilitate infants' early word comprehension and explain the early understanding of body part words. Parents were instructed to teach their infants, 4- to 5-month-olds or 10- to 11-month-olds, nonce words for body parts and a contrast object. Importantly, they were given no instructions about the use of touch. Parents…

Children achieve their first language milestones initially in gesture and prosody before they do so in speech. However, little is known about the potential precursor role of those features later in development when children start using more complex linguistic skills. In this study, we explore how children's ability to reflect on their degree of…

By their second birthday, children have begun using grammatical cues to decipher the meaning of newly encountered words. By 3 years of age, there is evidence that children are more reliant on grammatical than social cues to decipher verb meaning (Nappa, Wessel, McEldoon, Gleitman, & Trueswell, 2009). Here, we investigate children's reliance on…

Generic noun phrases, or generics, refer to abstract categories ("Dogs" bark) rather than particular individuals ("Those dogs" bark). Study 1 investigated how parents use gestures in association with generic versus particular reference during naturalistic interactions with their 2- and 3-year-old children. Parents provided…

Generic noun phrases, or generics, refer to abstract kind categories ("Dogs" bark) rather than particular individuals ("Those dogs" bark). How do children distinguish these distinct kinds of reference? We examined the role of one socio-pragmatic cue, namely pointing, in producing and comprehending generic versus particular…