Children often hear many new words in one conversation, and yet word learning research overwhelmingly focuses on how children learn and retrieve the meanings of single words. The current experiment tests how the number of labeled objects affects preschoolers' novel word referent selection immediately after encoding and after a one-week delay.…

Children's ability to learn words with multiple meanings may be hindered by their adherence to a one-to-one form-to-meaning mapping bias. Previous research on children's learning of a novel meaning for a familiar word (sometimes called a "pseudohomophone") has yielded mixed results, suggesting a range of factors that may impact when…

A word learning paradigm was used to teach children novel words that varied in phonotactic probability and neighborhood density. The effects of frequency and density on speech production were examined when phonetic forms were nonreferential (i.e., when no referent was attached) and when phonetic forms were referential (i.e., when a referent was…

Much has been said about children's strategies for mapping elements of meaning to words in toddlerhood. However, children continue to refine word meanings and patterns of word use into middle childhood and beyond, even for common words appearing in early vocabulary. We address where children past toddlerhood diverge from adults and where they more…

The present study investigates English-learning infants' early understanding of the link between the grammatical category "verb" and the conceptual category "event," and their ability to recruit morphosyntactic information online to learn novel verb meanings. We report two experiments using an infant-controlled…