Building Interconnected Networks of Word Knowledge Over Time

To become fluent language users, children must learn not only individual words but also connections between them. For example, connections are vital for understanding that "apples" are "yummy", something you can "eat" and similar to "oranges". To date, there is evidence that children develop increasingly sophisticated abilities to form these connections from regularities in the way that words co-occur with other words that are ubiquitous in everyday language. Yet despite the fact that children repeatedly experience such regularities day-to-day, existing evidence focuses just on what children learn from a single experience. We used a multi-session approach to examine the connections children build from repeated exposures over time. We found that from age four to six, children not only improve in their formation of connections between words from regularities in language, but also in building increasingly richly interconnected knowledge from one experience to the next.