Women are notably underrepresented in the academic sciences. Psychology is a pertinent case study of gender inequality in science, because women make up over three quarters of undergraduate and graduate students but only a third of all full professors. Here, publication records from 125 high-impact, peer-reviewed psychology journals are analyzed to describe nuanced patterns about how men and women contribute to research psychology. To determine gender, we classified over 750,000 authors on 200,000 unique publications by comparing the 1st name of each author to openly available census data. The data replicate previous reports of publication and citation gender gaps in psychology and significantly extend these results by showing that these gaps are persistent across subdiscipline and time but are mediated by various contextual factors. For example, although the size of the publication and citation gaps are not explained by the university affiliation of the authors' and frequency of coauthorship, the gaps are larger in high-impact journals and at the last-author position. These patterns have remained largely unchanged since at least 2003. These results provide a detailed look at the variety of factors contributing to the differences in how men and women publish in research psychology and provide free and openly available tools for assessing publication and citation differences across time, journals, and other academic disciplines.

Language learners rapidly acquire extensive semantic knowledge, but the development of this knowledge is difficult to study, in part because it is difficult to assess young children’s lexical semantic representations. In our studies, we solved this problem by investigating lexical semantic knowledge in 24-month-olds using the Head-turn Preference Procedure. In Experiment 1, looking times to a repeating spoken word stimulus (e.g., kitty-kitty-kitty) were shorter for trials preceded by a semantically related word (e.g., dog-dog-dog) than trials preceded by an unrelated word (e.g., juice-juice-juice). Experiment 2 yielded similar results using a method in which pairs of words were presented on the same trial. The studies provide evidence that young children activate of lexical semantic knowledge, and critically, that they do so in the absence of visual referents or sentence contexts. Auditory lexical priming is a promising technique for studying the development and structure of semantic knowledge in young children.

We introduce a new resource: the SAYCam corpus. Infants aged 6-32 months wore a head-mounted camera for approximately 2 hours per week, over the course of approximately two and a half years. The result is a large, naturalistic, longitudinal dataset of infant- and child-perspective videos. Transcription efforts are underway, with over 200,000 words of naturalistic dialogue already transcribed. Similarly, the dataset is searchable using a number of criteria (e.g., age of participant, location, setting, objects present). The resulting dataset will be of broad use to psychologists, linguists, and computer scientists.

In order to successfully acquire a new word, young children must learn the correct associations between labels and their referents. For decades, word-learning researchers have explored how young children are able to form these associations. However, in addition to learning label-referent mappings, children must also remember them. Despite the importance of memory processes in forming a stable lexicon, there has been little integration of early memory research into the study of early word learning. After discussing what we know about how young children remember words over time, this paper reviews the infant memory development literature as it relates to early word learning, focusing on changes in retention duration, encoding, consolidation, and retrieval across the first 2 years of life. A third section applies this review to word learning and presents future directions, arguing that the integration of memory processes into the study of word learning will provide researchers with novel, useful insights into how young children acquire new words.

Toddlers can learn about the meanings of individual words from the structure and semantics of the sentences in which they are embedded. However, it remains unknown whether toddlers encode similarities amongst novel words based on their positions within sentences. In three experiments, two-year-olds listened to novel words embedded in familiar sentence frames. Some novel words consistently occurred in the subject position across sentences, and others in the object position across sentences. An auditory semantic task was used to test whether toddlers encoded similarities based on sentential position, for (a) pairs of novel words that occurred within the same sentence, and (b) pairs of novel words that occurred in the same position across sentences. The results suggest that while toddlers readily encoded similarity based on within-sentence occurrences, only toddlers with more advanced grammatical knowledge encoded the positional similarities of novel words across sentences. Moreover, the encoding of these cross-sentential relationships only occurred if the exposure sentences included a familiar verb. These studies suggest that the types of lexical relationships that toddlers learn depend on the child’s current level of language development, as well as the structure and meaning of the sentences surrounding the novel words.