Words direct visual attention in infants, children, and adults, presumably by activating representations of referents that then direct attention to matching stimuli in the visual scene. Novel, unknown, words have also been shown to direct attention, likely via the activation of more general representations of naming events. To examine the critical…

Identifying the referent of novel words is a complex process that young children do with relative ease. When given multiple objects along with a novel word, children select the most novel item, sometimes retaining the word-referent link. Prior work is inconsistent, however, on the role of object novelty. Two experiments examine 18-month-old…

Theories of cognitive development must address both the issue of how children bring their knowledge to bear on behavior in-the-moment, and how knowledge changes over time. We argue that seeking answers to these questions requires an appreciation of the dynamic nature of the developing system in its full, reciprocal complexity. We illustrate this…

Determining the referent of a novel name is a critical task for young language learners. The majority of studies on children's referent selection focus on manipulating the sources of information (linguistic, contextual and pragmatic) that children can use to solve the referent mapping problem. Here, we take a step back and explore how children's…

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…

Classic approaches to word learning emphasize referential ambiguity: In naming situations, a novel word could refer to many possible objects, properties, actions, and so forth. To solve this, researchers have posited constraints, and inference strategies, but assume that determining the referent of a novel word is isomorphic to learning. We…

Young children tend to generalize novel names for novel solid objects by similarity in shape, a phenomenon dubbed "the shape bias". We believe that the critical insights needed to explain the shape bias in particular, and cognitive development more generally, come from Dynamic Systems Theory. We present two examples of recent work focusing on the…

Four experiments explored the processes that bridge between referent selection and word learning. Twenty-four-month-old infants were presented with several novel names during a referent selection task that included both familiar and novel objects and tested for retention after a 5-min delay. The 5-min delay ensured that word learning was based on…

Used a modification of Akhtar, Carpenter, and Tomasello's (1996) task involving interpretation of novel nouns to test whether 18- to 28-month-olds' smart word learning derived from general attention and memory processes rather than knowledge about the communicative intents of others. Findings similar to those of Akhtar and colleagues suggest that…

Two experiments explore children's spontaneous labeling of novel objects as a method to study early lexical access. The experiments also provide new evidence on children's attention to object shape when labeling objects. In Experiment 1, the spontaneous productions of 21 23- to 28-month-olds (mean 26;28) shown a set of novel, unnamed objects were…