Recognizing familiar words quickly and accurately facilitates learning new words, as well as other aspects of language acquisition. This study used the visual world paradigm with semantic and phonological competitors to study lexical processing efficiency in 2-5 year-old children. Experiment 1 found this paradigm was sensitive to vocabulary-size differences. Experiment 2 included a more diverse...

This study addresses the relationship between phonological complexity and vocabulary size in fifteen 30-month-old Swedish children, selected to cover a wide range of reported lexical development. It is in line with earlier studies indicating a relationship between phonological and lexical development in children and how it is affected by the ambient linguistic input. Phonological complexity of ...

In this paper we combine statistical analysis of large text databases and simple stochastic models to explain the appearance of scaling laws in the statistics of word frequencies. Besides the sublinear scaling of the vocabulary size with database size (Heaps’ law), here we report a new scaling of the fluctuations around this average (fluctuation scaling analysis). We explain both scaling laws b...

The development of speech perception during the 1st year reflects increasing attunement to native language features, but the mechanisms underlying this development are not completely understood. One previous study linked reductions in nonnative speech discrimination to performance on nonlinguistic tasks, whereas other studies have shown associations between speech perception and vocabulary grow...

Through the manipulation of the syntactic cue of word order and the semantic cues of noun animacy and noun size order, this study explores how different cue strength affects a child’s interpretation of a sentence. Subjects included 36 children [Mean age=50.72 mo.; SD=7.3 mo.]. A sentence interpretation test was administered to participants who would choose the “doer” of the sentence. Significan...

Language acquisition factors at work in toddlers between 2 1⁄2 and 3 years of age were investigated in the first longitudinal study of this kind. New age-appropriate tasks were devised to measure the development of vocabulary size; articulation accuracy; sensitivity to the phonemic features of, in this case, Australian English; and the degree of specialisation towards the native tongue, as meas...