CiteULike: briordan's word-learning

Word-meaning association in early language development

Rushen Shi — 2008-07-11T16:26:22-00:00

Brain and Cognition, Vol. 67, No. Supplement 1. (June 2008), pp. 38-39.

Priming and lexical interference in infancy

Suzy Styles — 2008-07-06T19:15:09-00:00

(2008)

Variability in Early Communicative Development

Larry Fenson — 2008-07-01T19:56:10-00:00

Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Vol. 59, No. 5. (1994), pp. i-185.

Does frequency count? Parental input and the acquisition of vocabulary

Judith Goodman — 2008-06-29T16:13:27-00:00

Journal of Child Language, Vol. 35, No. 03. (2008), pp. 515-531.

Studies examining factors that influence when words are learned typically investigate one lexical category or a small set of words. We provide the first evaluation of the relation between input frequency and age of acquisition for a large sample of words. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory provides norming data on age of acquisition for 562 individual words collected from the parents of children aged 0 ; 8 to 2 ; 6. The CHILDES database provides estimates of frequency with which parents use these words with their children (age: 0 ; 7–7 ; 5; mean age: 36 months). For production, across all words higher parental frequency is associated with later acquisition. Within lexical categories, however, higher frequency is related to earlier acquisition. For comprehension, parental frequency correlates significantly with the age of acquisition only for common nouns. Frequency effects change with development. Thus, frequency impacts vocabulary acquisition in a complex interaction with category, modality and developmental stage.

Bootstrapping word order in prelexical infants: A Japanese-Italian cross-linguistic study

Judit Gervain — 2008-06-24T10:59:35-00:00

Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 57, No. 1. (August 2008), pp. 56-74.

Learning word order is one of the earliest feats infants accomplish during language acquisition [Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.]. Two theories have been proposed to account for this fact. Constructivist/lexicalist theories [Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition, 74(3), 209-253.] argue that word order is learned separately for each lexical item or construction. Generativist theories [Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.], on the other hand, claim that word order is an abstract and general property, determined from the input independently of individual words. Here, we show that eight-month-old Japanese and Italian infants have opposite order preferences in an artificial grammar experiment, mirroring the opposite word orders of their respective native languages. This suggests that infants possess some representation of word order prelexically, arguing for the generativist view. We propose a frequency-based bootstrapping mechanism to account for our results, arguing that infants might build this representation by tracking the order of functors and content words, identified through their different frequency distributions. We investigate frequency and word order patterns in infant-directed Japanese and Italian corpora to support this claim.

When hearsay trumps evidence: How generic language guides preschoolers inferences about unfamiliar things

Craig Chambers — 2008-06-22T11:43:09-00:00

Language and Cognitive Processes, Vol. 23, No. 5. (2008), pp. 749-766.

Two experiments investigated 4-year-olds' use of descriptive sentences to learn non-obvious properties of unfamiliar kinds. Novel creatures were described using generic or nongeneric sentences (e.g., These are pagons. Pagons/These pagons are friendly). Children's willingness to extend the described property to a new category member was then measured. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that children reliably extended the property to new instances after hearing generic but not nongeneric sentences. Further, the influence of generic language was much greater than effects related to the amount of tangible evidence provided (the number of creatures bearing the critical property). Experiment 2 revealed that children continued to extend properties mentioned in generic descriptions even when incompatible evidence was presented (e.g., an example of an unfriendly pagon). The findings underscore preschoolers' keen understanding of the semantics of generic sentences and suggest that inferences based on generics are more robust than those based on observationally grounded evidence.

Mechanisms of word learning

Gil Diesendruck — 2008-06-22T00:00:07-00:00

(2006)

Action Speaks Louder Than Words: Young Children Differentially Weight Perceptual, Social, and Linguistic Cues to Learn Verbs

Amanda Brandone — 2007-07-21T19:18:33-00:00

Child Development, Vol. 78, No. 4. (2007), pp. 1322-1342.

This paper explores how children use two possible solutions to the verb-mapping problem: attention to perceptually salient actions and attention to social and linguistic information (speaker cues). Twenty-two-month-olds attached a verb to one of two actions when perceptual cues (presence/absence of a result) coincided with speaker cues but not when these cues were placed into conflict (Experiment 1), and not when both possible referent actions were perceptually salient (Experiment 2). By 34 months, children were able to override perceptual cues to learn the name of an action that was not perceptually salient (Experiment 3). Results demonstrate an early reliance on perceptual information for verb mapping and an emerging tendency to weight speaker information more heavily over developmental time.

What develops in language development?

Lou Gerken — 2008-06-19T01:49:22-00:00

Vol. 33 (2005), pp. 153-192.

Mapping sound to meaning: Connections between learning about sounds and learning about words

Jenny Saffran — 2008-06-19T01:44:45-00:00

Vol. 34 (2006), pp. 1-38.

King Solomon's take on word-learning: An integrative approach from the radical middle

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek — 2008-06-19T01:37:59-00:00

Vol. 36 (2008), pp. 1-29.

Infant speech perception bootstraps word learning

Janet Werker — 2006-06-14T17:12:10-00:00

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 9, No. 11. (November 2005), pp. 519-527.

By their first birthday, infants can understand many spoken words. Research in cognitive development has long focused on the conceptual changes that accompany word learning, but learning new words also entails perceptual sophistication. Several developmental steps are required as infants learn to segment, identify and represent the phonetic forms of spoken words, and map those word forms to different concepts. We review recent research on how infants' perceptual systems unfold in the service of word learning, from initial sensitivity for speech to the learning of language-specific sound patterns. Building on a recent theoretical framework and emerging new methodologies, we show how speech perception is crucial for word learning, and suggest that it bootstraps the development of a separate but parallel phonological system that links sound to meaning.

Neural Substrates of Language Acquisition

Patricia Kuhl — 2008-06-18T12:15:57-00:00

Annual Review of Neuroscience, Vol. 31, No. 1. (2008), pp. 511-534.

Infants learn language(s) with apparent ease, and the tools of modern neuroscience are providing valuable information about the mechanisms that underlie this capacity. Noninvasive, safe brain technologies have now been proven feasible for use with children starting at birth. The past decade has produced an explosion in neuroscience research examining young children's processing of language at the phonetic, word, and sentence levels. At all levels of language, the neural signatures of learning can be documented at remarkably early points in development. Individual continuity in linguistic development from infants' earliest responses to phonemes is reflected in infants' language abilities in the second and third year of life, a finding with theoretical and clinical implications. Developmental neuroscience studies using language are beginning to answer questions about the origins of humans' language faculty.

The Level of Detail in Infants' Word Learning

Rochelle Newman — 2008-06-15T02:05:31-00:00

Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 17, No. 3. (2008), pp. 229-232.

ABSTRACT- This article summarizes recent findings on infant word learning and recognition. Infants initially store very detailed representations of words, including details that are not truly necessary for word recognition. As they are exposed to more varied productions of words, they develop more sophisticated knowledge about which details are important, and streamline their representations, allowing them to better recognize words across different contexts, speakers, and environments.

Focusing on the relation: fewer exemplars facilitate children's initial verb learning and extension

Mandy Maguire — 2008-06-14T11:52:00-00:00

Developmental Science, Vol. 11, No. 4. (2008), pp. 628-634.

Abstract One of the most prominent theories for why children struggle to learn verbs is that verb learning requires the abstraction of relations between an object and its action ( Gentner, 2003). Two hypotheses suggest how children extract relations to extend a novel verb: (1) seeing many different exemplars allows children to detect the invariant relation between actions in different contexts ( Gentner, 2003), and (2) repetition of fewer exemplars allows children to move beyond the entities involved to extract the relation ( Kersten & Smith, 2002). We tested - and 3-year-olds’ ability to extend a novel verb after viewing the repetition of one novel actor compared to four different actors performing a novel action. Both ages were better at learning and extending a novel verb to a novel actor when shown only one actor rather than four different actors. These results indicate that during initial verb learning less information is more effective.

Acquisition of mental state language in Spanish children: a longitudinal study of the relationship between the production of mental verbs and linguistic development

Belen Pascual — 2008-06-14T11:38:29-00:00

Developmental Science, Vol. 11, No. 4. (2008), pp. 454-466.

Abstract The development of language indicating the emergence of thinking about the thoughts of self and others has been scarcely studied in Spanish-speaking children. For this reason, we studied the development of mental state language and various indicators of language development in 25 Spanish-speaking children assessed at 3, 3 , 4, 4 , and 5 years of age. We coded and categorized the 40,250 utterances children produced during the five time points, 1202 (3.01%) of which had mental terms. In this sample, mental state language in Spanish children developed with a similar timeline and patterns as described in English-speaking children. However, several findings were novel for studies of mental state language. The general indexes of syntactic development did not correlate with the production of mental terms. The Index of Lexical Diversity was associated with the frequency of references to verbs of desire. The results of regression analyses suggest that not only the development of subordinate sentences with complement is associated with genuine mental references to desires and beliefs, but the development of lexical skills as well.

Preschoolers' Perspective Taking in Word Learning: Do They Blindly Follow Eye Gaze?

Nurmsoo — 2008-03-07T16:40:28-00:00

Psychological Science, Vol. 19, No. 3. (March 2008), pp. 211-215.

Telling adjectives from verbs: 3- and 4-year-olds use morphological cues to interpret novel words

Lulu Song — 2008-06-07T23:33:41-00:00

(2007)

Statistical cross-situational learning to build word-to-world mappings

Chen Yu — 2008-06-07T12:58:41-00:00

(2006)

Regularizing Unpredictable Variation: The Roles of Adult and Child Learners in Language Formation and Change

Carla Kam — 2008-06-03T15:45:30-00:00

Language Learning and Development, Vol. 1, No. 2. (2005), pp. 151-195.

In this article we investigate what learners acquire when their input contains inconsistent grammatical morphemes such as those present in pidgins and incipient creoles. In particular, we ask if learners acquire variability veridically or if they change it, making the language more regular as they learn it. In Experiment 1 we taught adult participants an artificial language containing unpredictable variation in 1 grammatical feature. We manipulated the amount of inconsistency and the meaning of the inconsistent item. Postexposure testing showed that participants learned the language, including the variable item, despite the presence of inconsistency. However, their use of variable items reflected their input. Participants exposed to consistent patterns produced consistent patterns, and participants exposed to inconsistency reproduced that inconsistency; they did not make the language more consistent. The meaning of the inconsistent item had no effect. In Experiment 2 we taught adults and 5- to 7-year-old children a similar artificial language. As in Experiment 1, the adults did not regularize the language. However, many children did regularize the language, imposing patterns that were not the same as their input. These results suggest that children and adults do not learn from variable input in the same way. Moreover, they suggest that children may play a unique and important role in creole formation by regularizing grammatical patterns.

Word segmentation as word learning: Integrating stress and meaning with distributional cues

Michael Frank — 2008-06-01T02:49:51-00:00

(2007)

Do Six-Month-Olds Link Sound Patterns of Common Nouns To New Exemplars?

Ruth Tincoff — 2008-05-30T15:21:39-00:00

(July 2000)

Beyond babytalk: Re-evaluating the nature and content of speech input to preverbal infants

Melanie Soderstrom — 2008-05-30T13:11:11-00:00

Developmental Review, Vol. 27, No. 4. (December 2007), pp. 501-532.

Infant-directed maternal speech is an important component of infants' linguistic input. However, speech from other speakers and speech directed to others constitute a large amount of the linguistic environment. What are the properties of infant-directed speech that differentiate it from other components of infants' speech environment? To what extent should these other aspects be considered as part of the linguistic input? This review examines the characteristics of the speech input to preverbal infants, including phonological, morphological, and syntactic characteristics, specifically how these properties might support language development. While maternal, infant-directed speech is privileged in the input, other aspects of the environment, such as adult-directed speech, may also play a role. Furthermore, the input is variable in nature, dependent on the age and linguistic development of the infant, the social context, and the interaction between the infant and speakers in the environment.

Infant Pathways to Language: Methods, Models, and Research Directions

2008-05-30T12:53:41-00:00

(2008)

Form is easy, meaning is hard: resolving a paradox in early child language

Letitia Naigles — 2008-05-29T16:14:51-00:00

Cognition, Vol. 86, No. 2. (December 2002), pp. 157-199.

A developmental paradox is discussed: studies of infant processing of language and language-like stimuli indicate considerable ability to abstract patterns over specific items and to distinguish natural from unnatural English sentences. In contrast, studies of toddler language production find little ability to generalize patterns over specific English words or constructions. Thus, infants appear to be abstract auditory or language processors whereas toddlers appear to be non-abstract, item-specific language users. Three resolutions are offered to this paradox. The first, that no resolution is necessary because only the toddler findings come from language use in a communicative context and so only the toddler findings are relevant to linguistic knowledge, is rejected. The second, that the contradictions are rooted in the differing methodologies of the two sets of studies (comprehension vs. production), is found to explain important aspects of the contradictory findings. The third, that the contractions come from the differing content of the stimuli in the studies, is also found to be explanatory and is argued to carry greater weight. Resolution 3 suggests that the patterns that infants extract from their linguistic input are not yet tied to meaning; thus, toddlers do not lose these earlier-abstracted forms but their use of them is limited until they have been integrated with meaning. It is argued that in language acquisition, learning form is easy but learning meaning, and especially linking meanings and forms, is hard.

Children's use of phonology to infer grammatical class in vocabulary learning.

KW Cassidy — 2008-05-29T16:07:24-00:00

Psychonomic bulletin & review, Vol. 8, No. 3. (September 2001), pp. 519-523.

Prior studies of the relationship between phonological information and grammatical category assignment have focused on whether these relationships exist and whether people have learned them. This study investigates whether these relationships affect preschool children's vocabulary acquisition in a laboratory setting. Child participants learned 12 vocabulary words (6 nouns and 6 verbs) under three conditions, in which, (1) the syllable number/grammatical category relationship matched English, (2) the syllable number/grammatical category relationship was opposite to English, or (3) there was no relationship between syllable number and grammatical category. In the initial presentation of the words, children assumed that the novel words matched the pattern found in English. When the syllable number/grammatical category pattern matched that of English, the children learned more of the words. Phonological information also predicted error patterns. These results suggest that any account of vocabulary acquisition should consider the role of phonological information.

Using sound to solve syntactic problems: the role of phonology in grammatical category assignments.

MH Kelly — 2008-05-29T16:03:53-00:00

Psychological review, Vol. 99, No. 2. (April 1992), pp. 349-364.

One ubiquitous problem in language processing involves the assignment of words to the correct grammatical category, such as noun or verb. In general, semantic and syntactic cues have been cited as the principal information for grammatical category assignment, to the neglect of possible phonological cues. This neglect is unwarranted, and the following claims are made: (a) Numerous correlations between phonology and grammatical class exist, (b) some of these correlations are large and can pervade the entire lexicon of a language and hence can involve thousands of words, (c) experiments have repeatedly found that adults and children have learned these correlations, and (d) explanations for how these correlations arose can be proposed and evaluated. Implications of these phenomena for language representation and processing are discussed.

Defusing the Childhood Vocabulary Explosion

Bob Mcmurray — 2008-05-27T23:57:15-00:00

Word learning

Melissa Koenig — 2008-05-27T23:33:36-00:00

(2007), pp. 617-626.

Infants listen for more phonetic detail in speech perception than in word-learning tasks.

CL Stager — 2005-07-24T02:23:29-00:00

Nature, Vol. 388, No. 6640. (24 July 1997), pp. 381-382.

Infants aged 4-6 months discriminate the fine phonetic differences that distinguish syllables in both their native and unfamiliar languages, but by 10-12 months their perceptual sensitivities are reorganized so that they discriminate only the phonetic variations that are used to distinguish meaning in their native language. It would seem, then, that infants apply their well honed phonetic sensitivities as they advance and begin to associate words with objects, but the question of how speech perception sensitivities are used in early word learning has not yet been answered. Here we use a recently developed technique to show that when they are required to pair words with objects, infants of 14 months fail to use the fine phonetic detail they detect in syllable discrimination tasks. In contrast, infants of 8 months--who are not yet readily learning words--successfully discriminate phonetic detail in the same task in which infants aged 14 months fail. Taken together, these results suggest a second reorganization in infants's use of phonetic detail as they move from listening to syllables to learning words.

The role of words and sounds in visual processing: From overshadowing to attentional tuning

Vladimir Sloutsky — 2008-05-23T12:54:30-00:00

Cognitive Science (in press)

The role of language in acquiring object kind concepts in infancy

Fei Xu — 2007-02-21T20:34:58-00:00

Cognition, Vol. 85, No. 3. (October 2002), pp. 223-250.

Four experiments investigated whether 9-month-old infants could use the presence of labels to help them establish a representation of two distinct objects in a complex object individuation task. We found that the presence of two distinct labels facilitated object individuation, but the presence of one label for both objects, two distinct tones, two distinct sounds, or two distinct emotional expressions did not. These findings suggest that language may play an important role in the acquisition of sortal/object kind concepts in infancy: words may serve as "essence placeholders". Implications for the relationship between language and conceptual development are discussed.

What’s Behind Different Kinds of Kinds: Effects of Statistical Density on Learning and Representation of Categories

Heidi Kloos — 2008-05-22T21:15:13-00:00

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Vol. 137, No. 1. (2008), pp. 52-72.

Visual Statistical Learning: Getting Some Help from the Auditory Modality

Christopher Robinson — 2008-05-22T02:00:59-00:00

Auditory Dominance: Overshadowing or Response Competition?

Christopher Robinson — 2008-05-22T01:44:02-00:00

(2007), pp. 605-610.

Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words? The Flexible Nature of Modality Dominance in Young Children

Amanda Napolitano — 2004-12-28T18:09:51-00:00

Child Development, Vol. 75, No. 6. (2004), pp. 1850-1870.

Children acquire emotion categories gradually

Sherri Widen — 2008-05-20T23:18:30-00:00

Cognitive Development, Vol. 23, No. 2. ( 2008), pp. 291-312.

Some accounts imply that basic-level emotion categories are acquired early and quickly, whereas others imply that they are acquired later and more gradually. Our study examined this question for fear, happiness, sadness, and anger in the context of children's categorization of emotional facial expressions. Children (N = 168, 2-5 years) first labeled facial expressions of six emotions and were then shown a box and asked to put all and only, e.g., scared people in it. Before using fear in labeling, children had begun to include [`]fear' faces and to exclude other (especially positive) faces from the fear box/category; after using fear, children continued to include other (especially negative) faces. The same pattern was observed for happiness, sadness, and anger. Emotion categories begin broad, including all emotions/faces of the same valence, and then gradually narrow over the preschool years.

Learning words from reliable and unreliable speakers

Jason Scofield — 2008-05-19T12:16:10-00:00

Cognitive Development, Vol. 23, No. 2. ( 2008), pp. 278-290.

Three studies examined whether 3- and 4-year olds would trust a reliable speaker over an unreliable speaker when learning a new word and whether that trust would be reversed, and the word mapping revised, when a trusted speaker later proved unreliable. Study 1 indicated that 3- and 4-year olds trusted a reliable speaker over an unreliable speaker. Study 2 indicated that some 4-year olds reversed trust and revised a word mapping when a trusted speaker later proved unreliable. Study 3 indicated that those 4-year olds who reversed trust and revised the word mapping were likely to maintain the revision and tended to favor the previously reliable speaker over time. These results are discussed in terms of the role of speaker reliability in young children's word learning.

Attentional Learning and Flexible Induction: How Mundane Mechanisms Give Rise to Smart Behaviors

Vladimir Sloutsky — 2008-05-17T03:40:38-00:00

Child Development, Vol. 79, No. 3. (2008), pp. 639-651.

Young children often exhibit flexible behaviors relying on different kinds of information in different situations. This flexibility has been traditionally attributed to conceptual knowledge. Reported research demonstrates that flexibility can be acquired implicitly and it does not require conceptual knowledge. In Experiment 1, 4- to 5-year-olds successfully learned different context-predictor contingencies and subsequently flexibly relied on different predictors in different contexts. Experiments 2A and 2B indicated that flexible generalization stems from implicit attentional learning rather than from rule discovery, and Experiment 3 pointed to very limited strategic control over generalization behaviors in 4- to 5-year-olds. These findings indicate that mundane mechanisms grounded in associative and attentional learning may give rise to smart flexible behaviors.

Compositionality and Statistics in Adjective Acquisition: 4-Year-Olds Interpret Tall and Short Based on the Size Distributions of Novel Noun Referents

David Barner — 2008-05-17T00:13:45-00:00

Child Development, Vol. 79, No. 3. (2008), pp. 594-608.

Four experiments investigated 4-year-olds’ understanding of adjective-noun compositionality and their sensitivity to statistics when interpreting scalar adjectives. In Experiments 1 and 2, children selected tall and short items from 9 novel objects called pimwits (1-9 in. in height) or from this array plus 4 taller or shorter distractor objects of the same kind. Changing the height distributions of the sets shifted children’s tall and short judgments. However, when distractors differed in name and surface features from targets, in Experiment 3, judgments did not shift. In Experiment 4, dissimilar distractors did affect judgments when they received the same name as targets. It is concluded that 4-year-olds deploy a compositional semantics that is sensitive to statistics and mediated by linguistic labels.

A multimodal learning interface for word acquistion

Dana Ballard — 2008-05-13T20:44:56-00:00

The effect of functional morphemes on word segmentation in preverbal infants

Shi — 2008-05-11T10:12:08-00:00

Developmental Science, Vol. 11, No. 3. (May 2008), pp. 407-413.

MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories: User’s Guide and Technical Manual, Second Edition

L Fenson — 2008-04-27T19:22:36-00:00

(2007)

Early lexical development and maternal speech: A comparison of children's initial and subsequent uses of words

M Barrett — 2008-04-27T19:20:28-00:00

Vol. 18 (1991), pp. 21-40.

The link between statistical segmentation and word learning in adults

Daniel Mirman — 2008-04-22T01:09:39-00:00

Cognition, Vol. 108, No. 1. (July 2008), pp. 271-280.

Many studies have shown that listeners can segment words from running speech based on conditional probabilities of syllable transitions, suggesting that this statistical learning could be a foundational component of language learning. However, few studies have shown a direct link between statistical segmentation and word learning. We examined this possible link in adults by following a statistical segmentation exposure phase with an artificial lexicon learning phase. Participants were able to learn all novel object-label pairings, but pairings were learned faster when labels contained high probability (word-like) or non-occurring syllable transitions from the statistical segmentation phase than when they contained low probability (boundary-straddling) syllable transitions. This suggests that, for adults, labels inconsistent with expectations based on statistical learning are harder to learn than consistent or neutral labels. In contrast, a previous study found that infants learn consistent labels, but not inconsistent or neutral labels.

Fine-grained sensitivity to statistical information in adult word learning

Athena Vouloumanos — 2008-04-21T14:33:21-00:00

Cognition, Vol. 107, No. 2. (May 2008), pp. 729-742.

A language learner trying to acquire a new word must often sift through many potential relations between particular words and their possible meanings. In principle, statistical information about the distribution of those mappings could serve as one important source of data, but little is known about whether learners can in fact track multiple word-referent mappings, and, if they do, the precision with which they can represent those statistics. To test this, two experiments contrasted a pair of possibilities: that learners encode the fine-grained statistics of mappings in the input - both high- and low-frequency mappings - or, alternatively, that only high frequency mappings are represented. Participants were briefly trained on novel word-novel object pairs combined with varying frequencies: some objects were paired with one word, other objects with multiple words with differing frequencies (ranging from 10% to 80%). Results showed that participants were exquisitely sensitive to very small statistical differences in mappings. The second experiment showed that word learners' representation of low frequency mappings is modulated as a function of the variability in the environment. Implications for Mutual Exclusivity and Bayesian accounts of word learning are discussed.

Fast Mapping but Poor Retention by 24-Month-Old Infants

Jessica Horst — 2008-04-17T02:02:26-00:00

Infancy, Vol. 13, No. 2. (2008), pp. 128-157.

Naming Practices and the Acquisition of Key Biological Concepts: Evidence From English and Indonesian

Anggoro — 2008-04-11T05:42:30-00:00

Psychological Science, Vol. 19, No. 4. (April 2008), pp. 314-319.

Bilingualism in infancy: first steps in perception and comprehension

Janet Werker — 2008-04-02T00:44:07-00:00

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 12, No. 4. (April 2008), pp. 144-151.

Many children grow up in bilingual families and acquire two first languages. Emerging research is advancing the view that the capacity to acquire language can be applied equally to two languages as to one but that bilingual and monolingual acquisition nonetheless differ in some nontrivial ways. To probe the first steps toward acquisition, researchers recently have begun to use experimental methods to study preverbal bilingual infants. We review the literature in this growing field, focusing on how infants growing up bilingual use surface acoustic information to separate, categorize and begin to learn their two languages. These new data invite the expansion of standard linguistic theories to account for how a single architecture can support the acquisition of two languages simultaneously.

The shape of controversy: what counts as an explanation of development? Introduction to the Special Section

Larissa Samuelson — 2008-03-24T00:39:58-00:00

Developmental Science, Vol. 11, No. 2. (2008), pp. 183-184.