Previous studies have documented that children are slow to acquire adjectives into their productive vocabulary. Yet in laboratory studies, even very young children can extend novel adjectives to new instances. Two studies examined the relation between children’s acquisition of adjectives and children’s emerging knowledge about nouns. In Study 1, the input parents provide to children when talkin...

We evaluated a simple computational model of productive vocabulary acquisition, applied to simulating two case studies of 7-year-old children with developmental word-finding difficulties across four core behavioural tasks. Developmental models were created, which captured the deficits of each child. In order to predict the effects of intervention, we exposed the computational models to simulate...

In the study influences on the productive vocabulary are examined regarding 16 month old children with, or with no siblings at home (n = 121). A parental report form, CDI, was used as instrument.Hypotheses regarding effects of different interaction environments were derived from the literature, and significant effects on the productive vocabulary were found; The first effect was that the produc...

Vocabulary acquisition is one of the most challenging obstacles language learners must overcome. This is especially true for students wishing to study in overseas universities, where comprehension of academic texts is required. This dissertation evaluates the vocabulary teaching component of an intensive English teaching programme for students intending to enter universities in the U.S. It firs...

Are there individual differences in children's prediction of upcoming linguistic input and what do these differences reflect? Using a variant of the preferential looking paradigm (Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, Cauley, & Gordon, 1987), we found that, upon hearing a sentence like, "The boy eats a big cake," 2-year-olds fixate edible objects in a visual scene (a cake) soon after they hear the semantical...