The Slithy Toves Did Gyre And Gimble: How Toddlers Use Linguistic
Information to Learn New Words

Sudha Arunachalam
Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences
Boston University

To learn the meaning of a word, children must coordinate information
from different sources, e.g., their visual observation of the world,
and the linguistic context in which the word appears. This may be
particularly challenging for verbs, because (a) observational contexts
often present multiple possible interpretations for a new verb, and
(b) verbs are often uttered in the absence of their observable
referents. I will present several word learning experiments exploring
2-year-olds' use of linguistic information to meet these challenges.
The results highlight the tandem development of the child's linguistic
and other cognitive processing abilities, as well as their abilities
to integrate information from different sources over time.