Large language models (LLMs) show intriguing emergent behaviors, yet they receive
around four or five orders of magnitude more language data than human children. What …

Evolution is a blind fitting process by which organisms become adapted to their
environment. Does the brain use similar brute-force fitting processes to learn how to …

Starting around 6 to 9 months of age, children begin acquiring their first words, linking
spoken words to their visual counterparts. How much of this knowledge is learnable from …

A data-driven exploration of how children's language learning varies across different
languages, providing both a theoretical framework and reference. The Wordbank Project …

The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) are a widely used
family of parent-report instruments for easy and inexpensive data-gathering about early …

This position paper describes and critiques the Pretraining-Agnostic Identically Distributed
(PAID) evaluation paradigm, which has become a central tool for measuring progress in …

Young children learn to communicate in the language (s) of their communities, yet the
individual trajectories of language development and the particular language varieties and …

Object play yields enormous benefits for infant development. However, little is known about
natural play at home where most object interactions occur. We conducted frame‐by‐frame …

Everyday activities are replete with contextual cues for infants to exploit in the service of
learning words. Nelson's (1985) script theory guided the hypothesis that infants participate in …

NOW PUBLISHED BY PLURAL! This classic text now in its tenth edition and now available
from Plural Publishing, The Development of Language continues its focus on language …