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Infants' sensitivity to transitional probabilities (TPs) supports language development by facilitating mapping high-TP (HTP) words to meaning, at least up to 18 months of age. Here we tested whether this HTP advantage holds as lexical development progresses, and infants become better at forming word–referent mappings. Two groups of 24-month-olds (N = 64 and all White, tested in the United States) first listened to Italian sentences containing HTP and low-TP (LTP) words. We then used HTP and LTP words, and sequences that violated these statistics, in a mapping task. Infants learned HTP and LTP words equally well. They also learned LTP violations as well as LTP words, but learned HTP words better than HTP violations. Thus, by 2 years of age sensitivity to TPs does not lead to an HTP advantage but rather to poor mapping of violations of HTP word forms. Public Significance Statement: Learning words is a fundamental aspect of early language development. This experiment sheds light on how the mechanisms that support word learning change across time, and suggests that experience with patterns in speech relevant to finding word forms play an important role in mapping word forms to meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines word decision strategies that 40 U.S. college beginning and advanced learners of Chinese applied during reading. It first compares similarities and differences between the two groups in choosing strategies when making word decisions, then identifies effective word decision strategies from more than a hundred strategies used by learners. Results of the study indicate that although learners use various strategies requiring multiple levels of linguistic knowledge, the strategy of matching the target item to the learners' existing mental lexicon is predominant for both beginning and advanced learners. The results also show that the strategy of using contextual information to make word decisions is more frequently employed at the advanced level. In addition, the study reveals that the strategies required to use multiple linguistic cues and context information are better predictors of accurate word decision than other strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]