A key question in early word learning is how children cope with the uncertainty in natural naming events. One potential mechanism for uncertainty reduction is cross-situational word learning--tracking word/object co-occurrence statistics across naming events. But empirical and computational analyses of cross-situational learning have made strong…

Many theories of early word learning begin with the uncertainty inherent to learning a word from its co-occurrence with a visual scene. However, the relevant visual scene for infant word learning is neither from the adult theorist's view nor the mature partner's view, but is rather from the learner's personal view. Here we show that when 18-month…

This article reports the structure of associations among 101 common verbs and body parts. The verbs are those typically learned by children learning English prior to 3 years of age. In a free association task, 50 adults were asked to provide the single body part that came to mind when they thought of each verb. Analyses reveal highly systematic…

The developmental trend from overall-similarity to dimensional-identity classifications is explained by a quantitative model. The model provides good qualitative fits to the extant data. Three experiments examining classifications in 120 2- to 8-year-olds and in 20 undergraduates support specific new claims of the model. (TJH)

Examines how reference points for the categorical interpretation of high and low (adjectives) were defined by three- to five-year-old children and adults. Shows categorical interpretations of relative terms to be complex dependent. (HOD)

Six experiments involving 279 2- to 5-year-old children, 52 undergraduates, and 16 adults examined the interaction of perception and language in the development of magnitude marking of size, loudness, and achromatic color. Results suggest converging interactions between perception and language for size and loudness and antagonistic interactions…

Two experiments explore children's spontaneous labeling of novel objects as a method to study early lexical access. The experiments also provide new evidence on children's attention to object shape when labeling objects. In Experiment 1, the spontaneous productions of 21 23- to 28-month-olds (mean 26;28) shown a set of novel, unnamed objects were…