Early Word Learning

Gert Westermann is Professor of Psychology at Lancaster University. He is the Director of the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship Programme in Interdisciplinary Research on Infant Development and currently holds a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship. Nivedita Mani is Professor of Psychology at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in Germany. In 2014 she won the Fritz-Behrens Stiftung’s Science Prize and became a Member of Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2017.

• Preface, 1. Before the word: Acquiring a phoneme inventory, Titia Benders and Nicole Altvater-Mackensen, 2.The proto-lexicon: Segmenting word-like units from the speech stream, Caroline Junge, 3.Intrinsic and extrinsic cues to word learning, Padraic Monaghan, Marina Kalashnikova, and Karen Mattock, 4. Mapping words to objects, Jessica S. Horst, 5. Building a lexical network, Nivedita Mani and Arielle Borovsky, 6. Verbs: Learning how speakers use words to refer to actions, Jane B. Childers, Angeline Bottera, and Tyler Howard, 7. Listening to (and listening through) variability during word learning, Katherine White, 8. Individual differences in early word learning, Meredith L. Rowe and Kathryn A. Leech, 9. Early bilingual word learning, Christopher Fennell and Casey Lew-Williams, 10. ERP indices of word learning: What do they reflect and what do they tell us about the neural representations of early words?, Manuela Friedrich, 11. Computational models of word learning, Gert Westermann and Katherine Twomey