Caroline Rowland

What predicts how quickly children learn words?

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen

In this talk, I will present data from computational modelling, corpus analysis and from the multi-method Language05 project to explore why children differ in the speed with which they build their lexicon in the first two years of life.  I will describe three studies that show how input diversity, prelinguistic communicative abilities, and statistical learning abilities contribute to individual differences in vocabulary growth.  The talk illustrates how we are starting to build a picture of what kinds of learning mechanisms may underpin vocabulary development, and how these mechanisms parse incoming information from the child’s environment.