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Young toddlers' word comprehension is flexible and efficient.

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Date
2013
Authors
Bergelson, Elika
Swingley, Daniel
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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 article
Subject
Comprehension
Humans
Infant
Language
Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/12630
Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1371/journal.pone.0073359
Publication 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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Scholars@Duke

Bergelson

Elika Bergelson

Crandall Family Assistant Professor
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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