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The current study set out to examine physiological arousal and the emotional response associated with word learning success in young three-year-old predominantly white children. In particular, we examined whether children’s physiological arousal during a word learning task predicts their word learning success and whether successful learning predicts children’s subsequent positive emotions that may be triggered by their success at the task. We presented children (n = 50) with a cross-situational word learning task and measured their pupillary arousal during and following completion of the task, as well as changes to their upper body posture following completion of the task, as indices of children’s emotions during and following task completion. Children who showed greater physiological arousal during the novel word recognition task (n=40) showed improved subsequent word recognition performance. We found that children showed more elevated posture after completing a familiar word learning task compared to completing a novel word learning task (n=33) but results on children’s individual learning success and postural elevation were mixed. We discuss the findings with regards to children’s affective involvement in word learning.

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting closure of daycare centers worldwide, led to unprecedented changes in children's learning environments. This period of increased time at home with caregivers, with limited access to external sources (e.g., daycares) provides a unique opportunity to examine the associations between the caregiver-child activities and children's language development. The vocabularies of 1742 children aged 8-36 months across 13 countries and 12 languages were evaluated at the beginning and end of the first lockdown period in their respective countries (from March to September 2020). Children who had less passive screen exposure and whose caregivers read more to them showed larger gains in vocabulary development during lockdown, after controlling for SES and other caregiver-child activities. Children also gained more words than expected (based on normative data) during lockdown; either caregivers were more aware of their child's development or vocabulary development benefited from intense caregiver-child interaction during lockdown.

Anaphoric pronoun resolution in spoken language has been shown to be influenced by the first mention bias. While this bias has been well investigated in spoken languages, less is known about a similar bias in sign languages. In sign languages, pronominal pointing signs (index) are directed towards referential locations in the signing space typically associated with discourse referents. In German Sign Language (DGS), signers follow an ipsi-contralateral default pattern while tracking referents, i.e., the first referent is associated with the ipsilateral and the second referent with the contralateral area of the signing space. Hence, directing a pronoun to either the ipsi- or the contralateral side of the signing space refers to either the first or the second discourse referent. The present event-related potential study reanalyzes the data fromWienholz et al. (2018) and examines the first mention effect during pronoun resolution in ambiguous contexts in DGS. The original study presented participants with sentence sets containing two referents without overt localization in the first and a sentence-initial pronominal index sign in the second sentence directed to either the ipsilateral or contralateral side of the signing space. Based on the direction of the index sign, our analysis reveals an N400 for contralateral index signs suggesting increased processing costs triggered by a violation of the first mention effect. Thus, the current study provides first experimental evidence for a first mention effect in DGS and highlights the modality-independent nature of this effect.

Research on the early lexical-semantic system has described how toddlers organize word representations based on semantic and phonological features. This study is a longitudinal investigation of the development of this organization during infancy. Toddlers (n = 28, 15 female) were presented with a preferential looking task using an eye-tracker at 18, 21, and 24 months of age, manipulating semantic and phonological lexical links. Participants were from Mexico, of middle-high socioeconomic status. The experimental task consisted of presenting an auditory label, which was phonologically or semantically related or unrelated, with a displayed target image. Mean proportion of target looking, time-course of fixations, pupillometry, and vocabulary network analysis were used to describe the properties of priming effects. The results showed that phonological priming developed earlier than semantic priming, and that they were produced by behavioral interference. In addition, pupil dilation showed differential use of cognitive effort in critical developmental periods. Finally, the density of vocabulary networks correlated with semantic effects and vocabulary size with phonological effects. These findings extend our understanding of the development of the lexical-semantic system during infancy.

Adult language users can infer the meaning of a previously unfamiliar word from a single exposure to this word in a semantically and thematically constrained context, henceforth, predictive context (Borovsky, Elman, & Kutas, 2012; Borovsky et al., 2010). Children use predictive contexts to anticipate upcoming stimuli (Mani & Huettig, 2012; Borovsky et al., 2012), but the extent to which they rely on prediction to learn novel word forms is unclear (Gambi et al., 2016). Here, we examine children’s one shot learning from predictive contexts using a modified version of the one-shot learning ERP paradigm for children aged 7-13 years. In a first learning phase, we presented audio recordings of expected words and unexpected novel pseudowords in strongly and weakly constraining sentence contexts. In the following priming phase, the same recorded words and pseudowords were used as primes to identical/synonymous, related, and unrelated target words. We measured N400 modulations to the word and pseudoword continuations in the learning phase and to the identical/synonymous, related, or unrelated target words in the priming phase. When initially presented in strongly constraining sentences, novel pseudowords primed synonymous targets equally well as word primes of the same intended meaning. This pattern was particularly pronounced in older children. Our findings suggest that, around early adolescence, children can use single exposures to constraining contexts to infer the meaning of novel words and to integrate these novel words in their lexicons.

Older children with online schooling requirements, unsurprisingly, were reported to have increased screen time during the first COVID-19 lockdown in many countries. Here, we ask whether younger children with no similar online schooling requirements also had increased screen time during lockdown. We examined children’s screen time during the first COVID-19 lockdown in a large cohort (n=2209) of 8-to-36-month-olds sampled from 15 labs across 12 countries. Caregivers reported that toddlers with no online schooling requirements were exposed to more screen time during lockdown than before lockdown. While this was exacerbated for countries with longer lockdowns, there was no evidence that the increase in screen time during lockdown was associated with socio-demographic variables, such as child age and socio-economic status (SES). However, screen time during lockdown was negatively associated with SES and positively associated with child age, caregiver screen time and attitudes towards children’s screen time. The results highlight the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on young children’s screen time.