Learners use certainty to guide learning. They maintain existing beliefs when certain, but
seek further information when they feel uninformed. Here, we review developmental …

Language is a fundamentally social endeavor. Pragmatics is the study of how speakers and
listeners use social reasoning to go beyond the literal meanings of words to interpret …

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) served as a test case for determining
the role of extant vocabulary knowledge, endogenous attention, and phonological working …

Before formal education begins, children typically acquire a vocabulary of thousands of
words. This learning process requires the use of many different information sources in their …

How can modern neural networks like language models be useful to the field of language
acquisition, and more broadly cognitive science, if they are not a priori designed to be …

Representing objects in terms of their kinds enables inferences based on the long-term
knowledge made available through kind concepts. For example, children readily use lexical …

Bilingual environments present an important context for word learning. One feature of
bilingual environments is the existence of translation equivalents (TEs)—words in different …

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 …

Previous work has found that shy children show chance‐level disambiguation and retention
of novel word meanings in a typical lab‐based word learning task. This effect could be …

We know little about the mechanisms through which leader–follower dynamics during
dyadic play shape infants' language acquisition. We hypothesized that infants' decisions to …