The ABC of development

How do children resolve ambiguity when learning new words? I study how children identify meanings of unfamiliar words, with a focus on Mutual Exclusivity (ME). ME posits that children assume each object has only one label and novel words should therefore refer to novel objects. My research shows that children are flexible learners: although they often rely on ME during referent selection, they are nevertheless willing to map novel words onto familiar objects^{1, 2}. Additionally, I also studied how children use classifier information³ and respond to form-meaning systematicity⁴ during referent selection.

How does interactive shared reading shape children's development? A series of my studies suggest that early shared reading interactions may support language and brain development. For instance, early dialogic reading is positively associated with children's later productive vocabulary and sentence complexity¹, as well as frontal brain activation during a card-sorting task². Furthermore, parent-child dyads show greater neural synchronisation during shared reading than reading alone³. In addition to empirical research, to enable scalable coding of parental dialogic reading practices, we developed an AI-based coding program – AutoPEER – that automatically identifies dialogic reading strategies in parent-child interactions.

How do children decide what information to explore? Children often take an active role in interaction and learning. In free-play contexts, for example, toddlers frequently initiate joint attention with their caregivers¹. However, the benefits of active learning are nuanced: active sampling enhances preschool children’s learning only when children are intrinsically motivated to explore². Together with my earlier study³, which found no association between selective attention or executive function and preschool children’s word learning, my research suggests that individual differences in learning may be better understood in terms of how children engage with learning opportunities than cognitive control alone.