Tests of cross-situational word learning use a range of stimuli. How does the distinctiveness of a stimulus affect participantsability to learn its label? In two experiments, participants were presented with pairs of unfamiliar images accompanied bytwo pseudoword labels. The images were either two visually similar robots or two visually dissimilar novel objects. Bydesign, the mapping of label to image was purposefully unclear, and we further manipulated which images were displayedwith one another across trials (i.e., their presentation context). In one condition, pairs of images were randomly determined,while in the other, sets of images consistently appeared with one another throughout training. At test, participants weregiven one label and instructed to match it to one of four possible images. Participants who had been exposed to the visuallydissimilar objects outperformed those who had been exposed to the visually similar robots, regardless of presentationcontext.

The interrelatedness of lexical items, typically defined in termsof semantic or phonological overlap, has been shown toinfluence language learning. Given that language also containssequential structure, we investigate here whether temporaloverlap among words, formalized in graph theoretical terms asdisplaying the property of community structure, might alsohave consequences for learning. We create a graph organizedinto clusters of densely interconnected nodes with relativelysparse external connections. After assigning a novelpseudoword to each node in the graph, we generate acontinuous sequence of visually-presented items by walkingalong its edges. Word-by-word reading times suggest thatlearners are indeed sensitive to temporal overlap.Compellingly, we also demonstrate that prior exposure tosequences organized into temporal communities influencesperformance on a subsequent word recognition task.

Bilinguals are purported to be more creative than monolinguals, but the mechanism for this bilingual advantage is stillunresolved, with several different accounts proposed. Others have challenged the existence of bilingual advantages ingeneral. We examine existence as well as hypothesized semantic network difference based mechanisms for the relationshipbetween bilingualism and creativity here by measuring creativity and fluency for monolinguals and bilinguals. The fluencymeasure allowed us to analyze the structure of individuals semantic networks (average shortest path length, clusteringcoefficient, and modularity). We found no differences in creativity between monolingual and bilingual participants, with aBayesian test showing substantial evidence for the null hypothesis. We did find that aspects of semantic network structurepredicted creativity. These findings suggest that, contrary to previous work, the bilingual advantage does not exist in therealm of creativity.