For decades, a spirited debate has existed over whether infants’ remarkable capacity to learn words is shaped primarily by universal features of human language or by specific featuers of the particulare native language they are acquiring. A strong focus for this debate has been a well-documented difference in early word learning: Infants’ success in learning verbs lags behind their success in learning nouns.. In this review, we articulate both sides of the debate and summarize new cross-linguistic evidence from infants that underscores the role of universal features and begins to clarify the impact of distinctly different languages on early language and conceptual development.

Decades of research have documented in school-aged children a persistent difficulty apprehending an overarching biological concept that encompasses animate entities like humans and non-human animals, as well as plants. This has led many researchers to conclude that young children have yet to integrate plants and animate entities into a concept LIVING THING. However, virtually all investigations have used the word "alive" to probe children's understanding, a term that technically describes all living things, but in practice is often aligned with animate entities only. We show that when "alive" is replaced with less ambiguous probes, children readily demonstrate knowledge of an overarching concept linking plants with humans and non-human animals. This work suggests that children have a burgeoning appreciation of this fundamental biological concept, and that the word "alive" paradoxically masks young children's appreciation of the concept to which it is meant to refer.Keywords conceptual development; children; folkbiology; animacy; science educationThe relation between a word and the concept to which it refers lies at the very heart of successful communication. While often taken for granted, we heavily rely on the shared alignment of words and concepts between speaker and hearer. For example, a hearer will only be able to correctly attribute new information that they hear about "dogs" to all dogs if the word "dog" and concept DOG are aligned. But this alignment is not always perfect. On the one hand, it may be responsive to the context or mode of communication. It is well known that context is an important part of interpretation (Grice, 1957;Levinson, 1983;Sperber & Wilson, 1995; among many others). For example, in an engineering context, "fluid" maps to a concept including both liquids and gases, while in common parlance, it would likely be understood to map to liquids only. Beyond context, there may also be problems with the concept-word mapping itself. Hearers may simply lack the underlying concept corresponding to a particular word, for example, abstract concepts like JUSTICE or ATOM. They may map the word to a different concept than the one intended by the speaker. Or they may have the relevant concept firmly in place, but have not yet aligned it with the corresponding word.The discussion above is more than hypothetical, as misalignments between words and concepts have real consequences for children's learning. In this paper we focus on a particularly important example, the relation between the word "alive" and the concept LIVING THINGa core biological concept that encompasses animate entities like humans and non-human animals, as well as plants. Decades (Carey, 1985;Hatano, Siegler, Richards, Inagaki, Stavy, & Wax, 1993;Klingberg, 1952;Klingensmith, 1953;Laurendeau & Pinard, 1962;Piaget, 1929;Russell & Dennis, 1939;Slaughter, Jaakkola, & Carey, 1999). In contrast, we suggest an alternative interpretation: it is not that this concept eludes children, but rather that they have failed to align the w...

Researchers have proposed that the culture in which we are raised shapes the way that we attend to the objects and events that surround us. What remains unclear, however, is how early any such culturally-inflected differences emerge in development. Here, we address this issue directly, asking how 24-month-old infants from the US and China deploy their attention to objects and actions in dynamic scenes. By analyzing infants' eye movements while they observed dynamic scenes, the current experiment revealed striking convergences, overall, in infants' patterns of visual attention in the two communities, but also pinpointed a brief period during which their attention reliably diverged. This divergence, though modest, suggested that infants from the US devoted relatively more attention to the objects and those from China devoted relatively more attention to the actions in which they were engaged. This provides the earliest evidence for strong overlap in infants' attention to objects and events in dynamic scenes, but also raises the possibility that by 24 months, infants' attention may also be shaped subtly by the culturally-inflected attentional proclivities characteristic of adults in their cultural communities.

Research on early word learning reveals that verbs present a unique challenge. While English-acquiring 24-month-olds can learn novel verbs and extend them to new scenes, they perform better in rich linguistic contexts (when novel verbs appear with fully lexicalized noun phrases naming the event participants) than in sparser linguistic contexts (Arunachalam & Waxman, 2011; Waxman et al., 2009). However, in languages like Korean, where noun phrases are often omitted when their referents are highly accessible, rich linguistic contexts are less frequent. The current study investigates the influence of rich and sparse linguistic contexts in verb learning in Korean-acquiring 24-month-olds. In contrast to their English-acquiring counterparts, 24-month-olds acquiring Korean perform better when novel verbs appear in sparse linguistic contexts. These results, which provide the first experimental evidence on early verb learning in Korean, indicate that the optimal context for verb learning depends on many factors, including how event participants are typically referred to in the language being acquired.

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