Fourteen-month-old infants are unable to link minimal pair nonsense words with novel objects (Stager & Werker, 1997). Might an adult's productions in a word learning context support minimal pair word-object association in these infants? We recorded a mother interacting with her 24-month-old son, and with her 5-month-old son, producing nonsense…

An important problem verb learners must solve is how to extend verbs. Children could use cross-situational information to guide their extensions; however, comparing events is difficult. In 2 studies, researchers tested whether children benefit from initially seeing a pair of similar events ("progressive alignment") while learning new…

Analysis of the responses of monolingual Dutch and bilingual Turkish, Moroccan, and Surinamese children living in the Netherlands to word association and sorting tasks revealed no significant differences among the groups. Results of the study indicated that bilingualism does not affect cognitive-linguistic development. (22 references) (Author/VWL)