In English, categories of solid objects (e.g., couch) are similar in shape, but vary in color and material; categories ofnonsolid substances (e.g., yogurt) are similar in material, but vary in color and shape (Samuelson & Smith, 1999). Althougheven infants can discriminate between how solids and nonsolids should behave (Hespos et al., 2009), increasing evidencesuggests recognizing specific substances is difficult for children (Perry et al., 2014). This begs the question, what do adults evenknow about nonsolids? Twenty adults drew 23 familiar solids and nonsolids. 116 participants from Amazon Mechanical Turkattempted to identify each drawing. Participants more accurately identified drawings of solids (M=.70) than nonsolids (M=.25),X2(1)=13.87, p=.0002. Drawings of nonsolids leading to accurate identification often depicted prototypical containers (e.g.,milk carton). These results suggest visual recognition—even of nonsolids—is aided by shape and that adults may conceptualizenonsolids as more object-like than was previously thought.

When pronouncing novel/unknown words, readers often use prior experience with similar, neighbor words. Com-parison to neighbors can be helpful for unknown or novel words (wug is like pug), but it can also lead to errors (pint is notlike mint). We investigate whether pronunciation can be affected by top-down influences, specifically the perceived taboo-nessof a known neighbor. While orthographic similarity typically biases novel-word pronunciation to be similar to a known word,taboo-ness might bias pronunciation away from a likely one. Adults read aloud words from three lists– novel words that wereneighbors to taboo words, novel words that were neighbors to benign words, and known control words. All known neighborsand controls were frequency matched. Results show differences in the correspondence between pronunciation of novel wordsand known neighbors depending on the relative taboo-ness of the known neighbor. Findings suggest that perceived taboo-nesshas top-down influences on reading.

Theories of cognitive development emphasize the role of dyadic processes in language acquisition. Empirical research has focused on caregiver-child dyads at home, which does not facilitate teasing apart dyadic and individual processes. The preschool classroom is one understudied context in which the same child participates in multiple interactions. Here we disentangle sources of variance in children’s language using objectively measured peer speech in preschool classrooms.

We routinely encounter speakers with different accents andspeaking styles. The speech perception literature offersexamples of disruption of comprehension for unfamiliarspeech and also of listeners’ rapid accommodation tounfamiliar accents. Much of this research uses a singlemeasure and/or focuses on isolated word perception. Weinvestigated listeners’ abilities to comprehend and shadowconnected speech spoken in a familiar or unfamiliar accent.We found increases in shadowing latencies andcomprehension errors in the Dissimilar Speech relative toSimilar Speech conditions—especially for relatively informalrather than more academic style speech. Additionally, therewas less accommodation over time to Dissimilar than SimilarSpeech. These results suggest that there are costs both in theimmediate timescale of processing speech (necessary forshadowing) and in the longer time scale of listeningcomprehension when accent and other speech quality is verydifferent from one’s own speech.

By the time they are three-years-old, children raised in poverty hear 30 million fewer words than their socioeconomi-cally advantaged peers. This word gap predicts later school readiness outcomes and sets the stage for achievement gaps that canfollow the child through life. Although parent speech has become a subject of increasing study and intervention, less is knownabout speech in childcare settings. We conducted a longitudinal study in an early-intervention classroom for 2-3-year-old chil-dren from low-income, at-risk backgrounds. We examine the relationship between language input from teachers and peers andchildren’s language skills over one year. Results show that vocabulary knowledge influences children’s talkativeness in theclassroom, and talkativeness and the amount of language they hear positively relates to increases in their language abilities.Our application of automated measurement provides new insight into the dynamics of the classroom language environment andconsequences for language development in at-risk children.