Advancing knowledge of human development, developmental disabilities, and neurodegenerative diseases.
How do infants become word meaning experts? This registered report investigated the structure of infants’ early lexical representations by manipulating the typicality of exemplars from familiar animal categories.
The nominations for this year’s recipients read like a textbook of great mentoring practices – meeting students where they’re at, getting to know them as scholars and individuals, and guiding their learning with just the right mix of challenge and support.
During word learning moments, toddlers experience labels and objects in particular environments. Do toddlers learn words better when the physical environment creates contrasts between objects with different labels?
The environment in which toddlers learn language may have a greater impact on word learning than previously understood.
People say between 150 and 200 words a minute on average during a casual conversation.
Even through cute but unintelligible babbles, infants are hard at work learning how to become successful communicators.
We have a number of projects examining the learning processes that underlie language learning. Children between the ages of 6 months and 4 years are currently being recruited. http://www.waisman.wisc.edu/infantlearning/Welcome.html PI: Jenny Saffran, PhD Keywords: Infant and Child Development, Speech and Language Development
Title: Toddlers make use of speaker’s genders while listening to words Legend: Toddlers viewed pairs of familiar objects selected to be prototypically male or female. As they listened to words referring to these objects, we tracked their eye gaze. Toddlers were faster to fixate prototypically-gendered objects when they heard a voice from the same gender …
Our understanding of language relies on more than just the spoken word. A myriad of external cues, like nonverbal signals and a person’s characteristics, contribute to how we understand and process language as we speak and communicate with others.
How do learners gather new information during word learning? One possibility is that learners selectively sample items that help them reduce uncertainty about new word meanings.
