▪ Abstract Recent work in language acquisition has shown how linguistic form emerges from
the operation of self-organizing systems. The emergentist framework emphasizes ways in …

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 …

Is children's language acquisition based on innate linguistic structures or built from cognitive
and communicative skills? This book summarises the major theoretical debates in all of the …

Describes patterns of general communication development and of English specificity,
emphasizing individual patterns. This edition devotes more attention to individual …

First word learning should be difficult because any pairing of a word and scene presents the
learner with an infinite number of possible referents. Accordingly, theorists of children's rapid …

How do children learn their first words? The field of language development has been
polarized by responses to this question. Explanations range from constraints/principles …

To explore how online speech processing efficiency relates to vocabulary growth in the 2nd
year, the authors longitudinally observed 59 English-learning children at 15, 18, 21, and 25 …

When hearing a novel name, children tend to select a novel object rather than a familiar one,
a bias known as disambiguation. Using online processing measures with 18-, 24-, and 30 …

Abstract The “looking-while-listening” methodology uses real-time measures of the time
course of young children's gaze patterns in response to speech. This procedure is low in …

The following experiments were designed to determine the age at which infants can first
readily learn word–object pairings with only minimal exposure and without social or …