Using an oral sentence production task, we investigated how preschoolers (N = 28) produce agreement with complex noun phrases and compared their performance to college students (N = 32) to determine whether preschoolers produce agreement patterns that are qualitatively similar to adults'. We also conducted corpus analyses to investigate relevant…

A handful of recent experimental reports have shown that infants of 6-9 months know the meanings of some common words. Here, we replicate and extend these findings. With a new set of items, we show that when young infants (age 6-16 months, n = 49) are presented with side-by-side video clips depicting various common early words, and one clip is…

When learning verb meanings, learners capitalize on universal linguistic correspondences between syntactic and semantic structure. For instance, upon hearing the transitive sentence "the boy is glorping the girl," 2-year-olds prefer a two-participant event (e.g., a boy making a girl spin) over two simultaneous one-participant events (a…

Form preparation in word production, the benefit of exploiting a useful common sound (such as the first phoneme) of iteratively spoken small groups of words, is notoriously fastidious, exhibiting a seemingly categorical, all-or-none character and a corresponding susceptibility to "killers" of preparation. In particular, the presence of a…

New studies on how language learning occurs are beginning to chip away at some long-held notions about second-language acquisition and point to potential learning benefits for students who speak more than one language. New National Science Foundation-funded collaborations among educators, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and…

This study investigated how lexical access in naming tasks (picture naming, naming to open-ended sentences, and naming to category exemplars) might be influenced by different lexical factors during adolescence and adulthood. Participants included 1075 individuals, ranging in age from 12 to 83 years. Lexical factors examined included word frequency…