Semantic diversity in children and adult word recognition: The case of Spanish language.

Does the Presence of Semantic Head Facilitate Novel Word Learning in Mandarin-Speaking Children?

PURPOSE Characteristics of to-be-learned words influence word learning but are understudied in Mandarin-speaking children. The current study comprehensively investigated the effect of semantic head on word learning and examined the predictive role of verbal working memory and compound awareness. METHOD Fifty-nine children (Mage = 63.10 months) learned pseudo-disyllabic words with semantic head (WH words) and without semantic head (OH words). Learning was measured by four tasks (i.e., mispronunciation detection, referent identification, naming, and definition) immediately after training and by naming and definition tasks 1 day, 1 week, and 1 month after training. RESULTS Better learning outcomes for WH words than OH words were only observed in forming phonological representations. Significant differences were not observed between WH and OH words at all three posttraining intervals. Substitution errors in naming WH words increased 1 month after training compared to earlier time points, suggesting an interference from the OH counterparts during offline consolidation. Compound awareness contributed to children's word-learning performance after accounting for the role of verbal working memory. CONCLUSIONS The availability of semantic head may have alleviated the processing demands of WH words initially. However, this facilitation did not persist into the retention stage. WH words were more susceptible to interference during offline consolidation, resulting in significant forgetting over longer term retention. The absence of a semantic head in OH words may have rendered them more distinctive, requiring increased cognitive effort and deeper processing and thereby resulting in relatively robust retention. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.33049889.

Language is a factor in the identification and processing of number words.

Since the 1990s, the fields of numerical cognition and psycholinguistics have evolved largely independently. However, the research since then demonstrates that language and numbers are intrinsically related, particularly in multilingual contexts. Language characteristics (e.g., morpho-syntactic properties) and language status (e.g., monolingual vs. multilingual) influence numerical processing at multiple levels, from number identification and retrieval to advanced mathematical skills. This article builds on the contribution of Frenck-Mestre and Vaid (1992), "Language as a Factor in the Identification of Ordinary Words and Number Words", to further elaborate how language contributes to the learning of numerical concepts, especially the acquisition and representation of number words across development. While their findings provided initial important insights into bilingual number processing, subsequent research, which we discuss in the current article, further shows that language and multilingual experiences can shape lexical, semantic, and lexico-semantic access to numbers. We finish by outlining some future research directions for the study of multilingual number representations.

Revisiting the noun bias: How frequency explains cross-linguistic differences in noun and verb production across early childhood.

Frequency of occurrence is one of the main drivers of children's early vocabularies. However, multiple authors have concluded that it fails to account for one of the most important phenomena in word learning-the order in which children acquire nouns and verbs. Across many languages, there is an early noun bias despite nouns occurring far less frequently than verbs in caregiver speech. In this study we use large-scale caregiver-child corpora and a computational model to reexamine noun and verb learning in English, German, Spanish, and Mandarin. Our results show clear evidence for variations in the strength of the noun bias across languages that can be directly explained by a combination of the number of different nouns and verbs used by caregivers and their sufficient frequency: how often most nouns and verbs need to occur in caregiver speech to be learned. Our findings provide further evidence for frequency shaping early children's language development, in this case mapping onto the relative distributions of nouns and verbs in their mental lexicons. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

An Investigation into the Lexical Associations of Turkish Learners of English

Vocabulary knowledge is a key dimension of second language (L2) proficiency, yet the network organisation of words in the mental lexicon warrants further exploration. This study investigated the L2 English lexical associations of Turkish learners to unravel an understudied topic within this specific context. The study further examined the impact of learner proficiency and lexical properties on participants’ associative patterns. A Word Association Task (WAT), with 96 cue words from three lexical classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives) and two frequency bands (0–1000 and 2000–3000), was administered to 120 tertiary-level learners across two groups (lower vs. higher proficiency). The findings revealed a general dominance of meaning-based (semantic) associations. However, proficiency level and word-related differences were observed for position-based (collocational) and form-based (phonological/orthographic) responses: higher-proficiency learners produced a greater proportion of position-based links, whereas lower-proficiency ones relied more on form-based associations. Lexical class also shaped associative behaviour; while nouns and adjectives elicited largely semantic links, verbs, particularly lower-frequency ones, were more likely to trigger co-occurrence combinations. These findings provide insights into the developmental trajectory of the L2 mental lexicon of Turkish learners and offer pedagogical implications for designing vocabulary instruction that fosters deeper lexical networks.

Predicting Human Semantic Priming Using Multilingual Large Language Models

The role of linguistic knowledge in verbal fluency tests: How individual differences in language skills shape the mental lexicon.

"List as many words as you can that start with M." The verbal fluency (VF) task is simple, yet even a typical university student only manages to produce about 15 words within 1 min, and there is substantial variability around this mean. The present study examined how linguistic and domain-general abilities contributed to VF performance in a large sample of healthy adult native speakers of Dutch (N = 571). We assessed the effects of linguistic knowledge, processing speed, short-term/working memory, and fluid intelligence on performance in the VF task. To examine whether linguistic and domain-general abilities contribute differently across VF task types, we included semantic trials (category-based generation: animals, food) and phonemic trials (letter-based generation: words beginning with S or M). We assessed the total number of correct words produced and the time to first response. Mixed-effects modeling showed that linguistic knowledge predicted the total number of correct responses in both semantic and phonemic VF. Short-term/working memory and processing speed were also significant predictors, but with smaller estimated effect sizes. Time to first response showed little effect of linguistic skills. We discuss how linguistic knowledge shapes the structure of the mental lexicon such that it affects both meaning-driven and form-driven access to lexical items. In addition, we provide updated norms for VF performance in Dutch and practical suggestions for using the task. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).