Advancing knowledge of human development, developmental disabilities, and neurodegenerative diseases.
Children use the presence of familiar objects with known names to identify the correct referents of novel words. In natural environments, objects vary widely in salience. The presence of familiar objects may sometimes hinder rather than help word learning.
Say you are shown an apple, a banana and a fruit you have never seen before. Then you are asked to pick the “pifo.” Which fruit would you choose? Chances are you would select the novel fruit.
Language is used to identify objects in many different ways. For example, an apple can be identified using its name, color, and other attributes. Skilled language comprehension requires listeners to flexibly shift between different dimensions.
85 children with cerebral palsy (43 girls, 42 boys) were followed longitudinally between 18 and 54 months. Children were seen between 2-8 times, for a total of 322 data points.
The environments children are in, including how much and what kinds of stimulation they are exposed to, influence what and how they learn. One important task for children is zeroing in on the information that’s relevant to what they’re learning and ignoring what isn’t. A new study has found that the presence of background noise …
Only one out of the more than 200 bones in our bodies is free-floating, with no local attachment to other bones, but it’s no freeloader. The hyoid bone is located in the front of the neck, just below the lower jaw, carrying the weight of the tongue and playing a vital role in speech and swallowing.
It has been said that communication is the essence of human life. In fact, our ability to communicate an unlimited number of thoughts and ideas separates humans from all other creatures.
Legend: Results of a study in which toddlers learned new words in environments with different levels of background noise. The solid vertical line marks the onset of the target word. The dashed vertical line marks the beginning of the test window (300 ms after the onset of the spoken word). Chance performance is .5. Toddlers …
Title: Effects of classroom bilingualism on task-shifting, verbal memory, and word learning in children Legend: Children who experienced two years of Spanish exposure in a dual-immersion classroom outperformed monolingual children when learning new made-up words (e.g., “gateke”). This was especially true when they learned new words for objects they were familiar with (e.g., turtle). Citation: …
Legend: Fig. 1. The tokens of the determiner the for the three item types. Note the canonical formant transitions for the facilitating tokens and the steady formant values in the neutral token. Fig. 2. Proportion looking to target from onset of the to 1250 ms after target-word onset in the two conditions. Symbols and error bars …
