Children learn what words mean from hearing words used across a variety of contexts. Understanding how different contextual distributions relate to the words young children say is critical because context robustly affects basic learning and memory processes. This study examined children's everyday experiences using naturalistic video recordings to…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

Nouns form the first building blocks of children's language but are not consistently modified by other words until around 2.5 years of age. Before then, children often combine their nouns with gestures that indicate the object labeled by the noun, for example, pointing at a bottle while saying "bottle." These gestures are typically…

Individual differences in children's conceptual strategies at 3 years of age were predicted by aspects of children's behavior and language at 13 and 24 months. Production of pointing gestures at 13 months and nouns and attributive adjectives at 24 months were positively associated with the use of a taxonomic matching strategy at 3 years of age.…