During their first 18 months, infants learn about sound patterns, words, and concepts, acquiring and organizing information in these domains simultaneously. Early preferences and biases help to organize information and facilitate language development. In this talk I will present current research taking place in my laboratory exploring lexical development. I will discuss infants' categorization of novel objects and their ability to use inductive inferences to determine category membership. I will also present findings from studies exploring word segmentation, new word-object associations, and the development of relationships between words in the absence of semantic information.
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