The development of the lexicon
We are interested in the factors that influence the learning of new words, in particular, memory-based constraints. It is widely believed that the ability to remember the association between a new word and a new object depends on the nature of conceptual representation of the new object. We are attempting to show that difficulties involving generalization of newly learned words can also be explained by memory-based factors, rather than problems involving conceptual representation. We are testing the latter hypothesis using learning and lexical generalization tasks.