Building vocabulary networks

Project Summary: As children enter their second year of life, they experience rapid growth in their language knowledge which includes substantial increase in vocabulary size and the speed of online word recognition. Yet, there is also substantial variability in language skill during toddlerhood; 2-year-old children range from knowing a handful to hundreds of words. Children that fall on the low end of this variability – frequently called Late-Talkers (LTs) – are at increased risk for developing persistent language disorders, affecting their academic, social, and professional lives. Recent evidence suggests that LTs experience not only delays in building a sizeable vocabulary, but also show differences in the structure of their vocabularies. This project builds on this finding by seeking to establish a mechanistic connection between building early vocabulary structure and subsequent language growth by building word learning studies that are focused on building the individual structure of children’s vocabulary by focusing on semantic linkages between words. We propose to recruit 18- to 27-month-old children with diverse language abilities (including those who are late-talking) and backgrounds who take part in a series of experiments that probe how different types of individually tailored word learning tasks lead to short-term growth in language processing skills and vocabulary growth over a period of three months. This project advances theoretical accounts of early language learning and has high potential to inform early intervention practices by establishing a causal link between toddlers’ existing semantic knowledge and their growing language skills.