Essentialism is the idea that certain categories, such as" dog,"" man," or" intelligence," have
an underlying reality or true nature that gives objects their identity. Where does this idea …

We examine the question of which aspects of language are uniquely human and uniquely
linguistic in light of recent suggestions by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the only such …

The authors present a Bayesian framework for understanding how adults and children learn
the meanings of words. The theory explains how learners can generalize meaningfully from …

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 …

Developmental dyslexia, reading disability, and reading impairment all refer to unexpected
and unexplained poor performance in reading. Expected levels of reading performance can …

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 …

In the first part of this chapter, I discuss vocabulary development and implications for
academic success, including the relationship between early vocabulary and later literacy …

Picture book reading is a very common form of interaction between parents and very young
children. Here we explore to what extent young children transfer novel information between …

Recent work has shown that large text-based neural language models, trained with
conventional supervised learning objectives, acquire a surprising propensity for few-and …

In learning the meanings of words, children are guided by a set of constraints that give
privilege to some potential meanings over others. These word-learning constraints are …