ArticleChild development perspectives2020
The Comprehension Boost in Early Word Learning: Older Infants Are Better Learners.
Article in Child development perspectives, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Continuous developmental changes in word recognition and language learning across early childhood.eLife · 2026Article
- Early child measures outpredict input measures of preschool language skills in U.S. English learners.Developmental psychology · 2026Article
- Parental Language Mixing in Montreal: Rates, Predictors, and Relation to Infants' Vocabulary Size.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Article
- Early Production of Imperceptible Words by Infants and Toddlers Born Deaf or Blind.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Early-emerging combinatorial thought: Human infants flexibly combine kind and quantity concepts.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Article
- Infants Infer Social Relationships Between Individuals Who Engage in Imitative Social Interactions.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
- Monolingual and bilingual infants' attention to talking faces: evidence from eye-tracking and Bayesian modeling.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Article
- Peekbank: An open, large-scale repository for developmental eye-tracking data of children's word recognition.Behavior research methods · 2023Article
- Talker variability is not always the right noise: 14 month olds struggle to learn dissimilar word-object pairs under talker variability conditions.Journal of experimental child psychology · 2023Article
- Coping with dialects from birth: Role of variability on infants' early language development. Insights from Norwegian dialects.Developmental science · 2023Article
- From social contingency to verbal reference: A constructivist hypothesis.Psychological review · 2022Review
- Nonverbal Action Interpretation Guides Novel Word Disambiguation in 12-Month-Olds.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2022Article
- Learning Through Processing: Toward an Integrated Approach to Early Word Learning.Annual review of linguistics · 2022Article
- Toward a Precision Science of Word Learning: Understanding Individual Vocabulary Pathways.Child development perspectives · 2021Article
- No Evidence of Robust Noun-Referent Associations in German-Learning 6- to 14-Month-Olds.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Toward Dynamical Modeling of Infants' Looking Times.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive scienceArticle
- Gazing Into Language Development: Exploring Individual Variability in Early Word Recognition in Infancy Through Eye-Tracking.Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant StudiesArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
Recent research has revealed that infants begin understanding words at around 6 months. After that, infants' comprehension vocabulary increases gradually in a linear way over 8-18 months, according to data from parental checklists. In contrast, infants' word comprehension improves robustly, qualitatively, and in a nonlinear way just after their first birthday, according to data from studies on spoken word comprehension. In this review, I integrate observational and experimental data to explain these divergent results. I argue that infants' comprehension boost is not well-explained by changes in their language input for common words, but rather by proposing that they learn to take better advantage of relatively stable input data. Next, I propose potentially complementary theoretical accounts of what makes older infants better learners. Finally, I suggest how the research community can expand our empirical base in this understudied area, and why doing so will inform our knowledge about child development.
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Registered trials
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