Infant-directed speech (IDS), compared with adult-directed speech (ADS), is characterized by a slower rate, a higher fundamental frequency, greater pitch variations, longer pauses, repetitive intonational structures, and shorter sentences. Despite studies on the properties of IDS, there is no direct demonstration of its effects for word learning in infants. This study examined whether 21- and 27-month-old children learned novel words better in IDS than in ADS. Two major findings emerged. First, 21-month-olds reliably learned words only in the IDS condition, although children with relatively larger vocabulary than their peers learned in the ADS condition as well. Second, 27-month-olds reliably learned the words in the ADS condition. These results support the implicitly held assumption that IDS does in fact facilitate word mapping at the start of lexical acquisition and that its influence wanes as language development proceeds.

Verbs are harder to learn than nouns in English and in many other languages, but are relatively easy to learn in Chinese. This paper evaluates one potential explanation for these findings by examining the construct of imageability, or the ability of a word to produce a mental image. Chinese adults rated the imageability of Chinese words from the Chinese Communicative Development Inventory (Tardif et al., in press). Imageability ratings were a reliable predictor of age of acquisition in Chinese for both nouns and verbs. Furthermore, whereas early Chinese and English nouns do NOT differ in imageability, verbs receive higher imageability ratings in Chinese than in English. Compared with input frequency, imageability independently accounts for a portion of the variance in age of acquisition (AoA) of verb learning in Chinese and English.

The intermodal preferential looking paradigm (IPLP) has proven to be a revolutionary method for the examination of infants' emerging language knowledge. In the IPLP, infants' language comprehension is measured by their differential visual fixation to two images presented side-by-side when only one of the images matches an accompanying linguistic stimulus. Researchers can examine burgeoning knowledge in the areas of phonology, semantics, syntax, and morphology in infants not yet speaking. The IPLP enables the exploration of the underlying mechanisms involved in language learning and illuminates how infants identify the correspondences between language and referents in the world. It has also fostered the study of infants' conceptions of the dynamic events that language will express. Exemplifying translational science, the IPLP is now being investigated for its clinical and diagnostic value.

Research has shown that distinct insular subregions are associated with particular neural networks (e.g., attentional and sensorimotor networks). Based on the evidence that playing action video games (AVGs) facilitates attentional and sensorimotor functions, this study examined the relation between AVG experience and the plasticity of insular subregions and the functional networks therein that are related to attentional and sensorimotor functions. By comparing AVG experts and amateurs, we found that AVG experts had enhanced functional connectivity and grey matter volume in insular subregions. Furthermore, AVG experts exhibited increased functional connectivity between the attentional and sensorimotor networks, and the experience-related enhancement was predominantly evident in the left insula, an understudied brain area. Thus, AVG playing may enhance functional integration of insular subregions and the pertinent networks therein.