Purpose: This study compares responses of children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) who use spoken language with responses of children who have typical hearing on a repeated word association task to evaluate lexical-semantic organization. Method: This study included 109 participants in early kindergarten or who had completed first grade. The…

Do children learn a new word by tracking co-occurrences between words and referents across multiple instances ("cross-situational learning" models), or is word-learning a "one-track" process, where learners maintain a single hypothesis about the possible referent, which may be verified or falsified in future occurrences…

As education gets increasingly digitized, and intelligent tutoring systems gain commercial prominence, scalable assessment generation mechanisms become a critical requirement for enabling increased learning outcomes. Assessments provide a way to measure learners' level of understanding and difficulty, and personalize their learning. There have…

This paper evaluates the proposal that general associative mechanisms underlie the earliest stages of word learning but that these same general mechanisms, operating over language input, enable children to identify domain-specific cues that ultimately help to constrain word learning, rendering children more sophisticated language users. As a…

In two experiments, the use of mutual exclusivity in the naming of whole objects was examined in monolingual and bilingual 3- and 6-year-olds. Once an object has a known name, then via principles of mutual exclusivity it is often assumed that a new name given to the object must refer to some part, substance, or other property of the object.…

Young children are readily able to use known labels to constrain hypotheses about the meanings of new words under conditions of referential ambiguity. At issue is the kind of information children use to constrain such hypotheses. According to one theory, children take into account the speaker's intention when solving a referential puzzle. In the…

The evolution of young children's categories, as measured by category name production, was studied. Results indicated that four sequences of category evolution were found, formed by the intersection of two factors: overlap vs. mutual exclusivity and first re-assignment separate vs. first re-assignment joint. (26 references) (Author/CB)

Many of the most talented authors and artists of the past and present have shared their thoughts and their gifts with young children through picture books. Many picture books allow young children to explore important ideas and to stretch their minds far beyond rote memorization. Young children absorb knowledge at a very rapid pace. In an age of…