One major feat in development is acquiring vocabulary for nouns, a process that necessitates learning a systematic pairing between an auditory and a visual stimulus. This is computationally complex because the acoustic signal produced for a given noun, such as “dog,” varies considerably as do objects in the environment that are given this label. Studies that have separately examined auditory and visual variability suggest that variability in either domain can facilitate word learning. The goal of the current work is to examine simultaneous contributions of auditory and visual variability on word learning. Typically developing infants (15–20 months of age) participate in nine weekly sessions. Each session entails exposure to nouns in a naturalistic play environment where children manipulate visual exemplars while listening to auditory exemplars. Auditory exemplars consist of productions by either ten talkers or by a single talker. Visual exemplars consist of objects that are highly variable or minimally variable in appearance. We measure learning for training exemplars, generalization to novel exemplars, and vocabulary size. Our research questions are (1) does variability in the auditory domain alone facilitate word learning as has been shown for visual variability, (2) to what degree does simultaneous variability in both modalities influences noun learning.
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