How do children learn the meanings of number words like "one," "two," and "three"? Whereas many words that children learn in early acquisition denote individual things and their properties (e.g., cats, colors, shapes), numerals, like quantifiers, denote the properties of sets. Unlike quantifiers such as "several" and "many," numerals denote…

Many comprehension theories assert that increasing the distance between elements participating in a linguistic relation (e.g., a verb and a noun phrase argument) increases the difficulty of establishing that relation during on-line comprehension. Such "locality effects" are expected to increase reading times and are thought to reveal properties…

While content words (e.g., 'dog') tend to carry meaning, function words (e.g., 'the') mainly serve syntactic purposes. Here, we ask whether 17-month old infants can use one language-universal cue to identify function word candidates: their high frequency of occurrence. In Experiment 1, infants listened to a series of short, naturally recorded…

This paper reports the findings of an investigation aimed at gaining a clearer understanding of the nature of vocabulary difficulties associated with dyslexia and associated risk status. Three studies were conducted to examine preschoolers' access and mastery of syntactic- and phonological-based processes believed to support word learning. Results…

Prior studies of ambiguity resolution in young children have found that children rely heavily on lexical information but persistently fail to use referential constraints in online parsing [Trueswell, J.C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N.M., & Logrip, M.L, (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children.…