Although linguistic and nonlinguistic cues help young children infer meaning when presented with unfamiliar words, little is known about how syntactic information and early bilingual experience shape word learning. This study examined how monolingual and bilingual 24- to 30-month-olds' disambiguation of novel words during a mutual exclusivity task differs as a function of syntactic cues, age, and productive vocabulary. English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals were presented with familiar and novel objects within a syntactic context (e.g., "Give me the blick!") or in isolation (e.g., "Blick!"). Results showed that monolinguals and bilinguals adhered to mutual exclusivity more often when provided with syntactic cues than when those cues were absent. Furthermore, bilinguals' mutually exclusive disambiguation of novel words increased with age, but only when syntactic cues were available. These results provide insight into factors that influence children's disambiguation of novel words. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

Using an eye-tracking paradigm, we examined the strength and speed of access to lexical knowledge (e.g., our representation of the word dog in our mental vocabulary) and semantic knowledge (e.g., our knowledge that a dog is associated with a leash) via both spoken words (e.g., “dog”) and characteristic sounds (e.g., a dog’s bark). Results show that both spoken words and characteristic sounds activate lexical and semantic knowledge, but with different patterns. Spoken words activate lexical knowledge faster than characteristic sounds do, but with the same strength. In contrast, characteristic sounds access semantic knowledge stronger than spoken words do, but with the same speed. These findings reveal similarities and differences in the activation of conceptual knowledge by verbal and non-verbal means and advance our understanding of how auditory input is cognitively processed.