Young toddlers' word comprehension is flexible and efficient.
Abstract
Much of what is known about word recognition in toddlers comes from eyetracking studies.
Here we show that the speed and facility with which children recognize words, as revealed
in such studies, cannot be attributed to a task-specific, closed-set strategy; rather,
children's gaze to referents of spoken nouns reflects successful search of the lexicon.
Toddlers' spoken word comprehension was examined in the context of pictures that had
two possible names (such as a cup of juice which could be called "cup" or "juice")
and pictures that had only one likely name for toddlers (such as "apple"), using a
visual world eye-tracking task and a picture-labeling task (n = 77, mean age, 21 months).
Toddlers were just as fast and accurate in fixating named pictures with two likely
names as pictures with one. If toddlers do name pictures to themselves, the name provides
no apparent benefit in word recognition, because there is no cost to understanding
an alternative lexical construal of the picture. In toddlers, as in adults, spoken
words rapidly evoke their referents.
Type
Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/12630Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1371/journal.pone.0073359Publication Info
Bergelson, Elika; & Swingley, Daniel (2013). Young toddlers' word comprehension is flexible and efficient. PLoS One, 8(8). pp. e73359. 10.1371/journal.pone.0073359. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/12630.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Elika Bergelson
Associate Research Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Dr. Bergelson accepts PhD applicants through the Developmental and Cog/CogNeuro areas
of P&N and the CNAP program.In my research, I try to understand the interplay of processes
during language acquisition. In particular, I am interested in how word learning relates
to other aspects of learning language (e.g. speech sound acquisition, grammar/morphology
learning), and social/cognitive development more broadly (e.g. joint attention processes)
in the first few

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