Naomi Havron
Biographic Data
| ID | 1463554 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Naomi Havron |
| GIVEN NAMES | Naomi |
| FAMILY NAME | Havron |
| SIGNATURE | HAVRON N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Haifa |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6429-1546 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The relationship between maternal input, culture, and the strength of noun bias in Palestinian-Arabic-learning infants – Addendum
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The relationship between maternal input, culture, and the strength of noun bias in Palestinian-Arabic-learning infants
Noun bias is the tendency to acquire nouns earlier than other syntactic categories. Whether it is universal or language and culture dependent is debated. We investigated noun bias in the receptive lexicon of Palestinian-Arabic-learning infants and examined whether maternal input and cultural values are related to lexicon composition beyond the language’s structural properties. Thirty-one infants (16–24 months) completed a Computerized Comprehensi…
Testing the relationship between preferences for infant-directed speech and vocabulary development
From early on, infants show a preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS), and exposure to IDS has been correlated with language outcome measures such as vocabulary. The present multi-laboratory study explores this issue by investigating whether there is a link between early preference for IDS and later vocabulary size. Infants’ preference for IDS was tested as part of the ManyBabies 1 project, and follow-up CDI d…
Diversity as the Fuel of Theory
We are grateful to the authors of the six commentaries on our analysis of demographic biases in the CHILDES database. The commentaries unanimously celebrate CHILDES’ contributions, as do we. CHILDES is a remarkable resource, foundational for cross-linguistic and theoretical advances in child language research and still holding extraordinary untapped potential. MacWhinney and Snow (2025) and Christiansen and McCauley (2025) argue that CHILDES corp…
Syntactic Adaptation
Syntactic adaptation is the phenomenon whereby exposure to particular syntactic structures influences subsequent language processing and production
Syntactic Adaptation and Word Learning in 3- to 4-Year-Olds
In a recent study, preschoolers adapted their syntactic expectations about a familiar phrase in French; this adaptation affected later word learning. In two experiments, we probed the generality of this finding by replicating the experiment and extending it to a different expression in English. We examined the ambiguous phrase the baby, which can be followed by nouns (the baby monkeys) or verbs (the baby sleeps). In induction trials, the baby con…
Validation of an open source, remote web‐based eye‐tracking method (WebGazer) for research in early childhood
Measuring eye movements remotely via the participant's webcam promises to be an attractive methodological addition to in‐person eye‐tracking in the lab. However, there is a lack of systematic research comparing remote web‐based eye‐tracking with in‐lab eye‐tracking in young children. We report a multi‐lab study that compared these two measures in an anticipatory looking task with toddlers using WebGazer.js and jsPsych. Results of our remotely tes…
Learning to predict and predicting to learn
Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. This is syntactic bootstrapping. A learner that uses syntactic bootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semantic information that a syntactic context provides. Based on the semantic seed hypothesis, children discover the semantic predictiveness of syntactic contexts by tracking the distribution of familiar words.…
There might be more to syntactic bootstrapping than being pragmatic
In ‘Being pragmatic about syntactic bootstrapping’, Hacquard (2022) argues that abstract syntax is useful for word learning, but that an additional cue, pragmatics, is both necessary and available for young children during the first steps of language acquisition. She focuses on modals and attitude verbs, where the physical context seems particularly impoverished as the sole basis for deriving meanings, and thus where linguistic cues may be partic…
Towards Diversifying Early Language Development Research
A survey of diversity in leading language acquisition journals revealed that only 2% of the 7,000+ languages of the world are represented. With a long-term aim of empowering researchers everywhere to contribute to this literature, we organized the First Truly Global /L+/ International Summer/Winter School on Language Acquisition (/L+/). /L+/ was a free 5-day virtual school that facilitated the interchange of expertise among early career researche…
Socioeconomic status correlates with measures of Language Environment Analysis (Lena) system
Using a meta-analytic approach, we evaluate the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and children's experiences measured with the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system. Our final analysis included 22 independent samples, representing data from 1583 children. A model controlling for LENA TM measures, age and publication type revealed an effect size of r z = .186, indicating a small effect of SES on children's language experiences. …
Community-set goals are needed to increase diversity in language acquisition research
This commentary argues that to increase diversity in language acquisition research, the field should define specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-defined goals, and prioritize solutions based on their importance, tractability, and neglectedness, ideally in collaboration with a variety of other agents outside the research community
The Influence Of Sibship Composition On Language Development At Age 2 years in the Elfe birth cohort study
Using data from 12,296 children (49.3% female) from the French ELFE birth cohort, we analyzed the effect of various characteristics of the siblings on children’s expressive vocabulary. Children’s vocabulary at age 2 years was negatively associated with the number of older siblings (-.08 SD per additional sibling), and this effect was partly mediated by parental interactions. In an analysis restricted to children with one older sibling, the vocabu…
Learning to predict and predicting to learn
Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down itsprobable meaning. This is syntactic bootstrapping. A learner that uses syntacticbootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semanticinformation that a syntactic context provides. Based on the semantic seed hypothesis,children discover the semantic predictiveness of syntactic contexts by tracking thedistribution of familiar words. We p…
The influence of sibship composition on language development at 2 years of age in the Elfe birth cohort study
The number of older siblings a child has is negatively correlated with the child's verbal skills, an effect that is well known in the literature. However, few studies have examined the effect of older siblings' sex, of the age gap between siblings, of having foreign-speaking parents, as well as the mediating role of parental interaction. Using data from 12,296 children (49.3% female) from the French ELFE birth cohort, we analyzed the effect of th…
Child-directed and overheard input from different speakers in two distinct cultures
Despite the fact that in most communities interaction occurs between the child and multiple speakers, most previous research on input to children focused on input from mothers. We annotated recordings of Sesotho-learning toddlers living in non-industrial Lesotho in South Africa, and French-learning toddlers living in urban regions in France. We examined who produced the input (mothers, other children, adults), how much input was child directed, a…
The effect of older sibling, postnatal maternal stress, and household factors on language development in two- to four-year-old children
Previous literature has shown that family structure affects language development. Here, factors relating to older siblings (their presence in the house, sex, and age gap), mothers (maternal stress), and household size and residential crowding were assessed to systematically examine the different roles of these factors. Data from mother-child dyads in a Singaporean birth cohort, (677-855 dyads; 52% males; 58% to 61% Chinese, 20% to 24% Malay, 17% …
“The tiger is hitting! the duck too!” 3-year-olds can use prosodic information to constrain their interpretation of ellipsis
Syntactic prediction adaptation accounts for language processing and language learning
Previous literature has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions, and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. The current study tested whether they could use this mechanism to disambiguate words that are ambiguous between a noun and a verbinterpretation. We tested two-to-four-year-old French children using the phrase la petite followed by a homophone that could be interpreted as either a…
Socioeconomic status correlates with measures of Language ENvironment Analysis (Lena) system
Using a meta-analytic approach, we evaluate the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and children’s experiences measured with the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system. Our final analysis included 22 independent samples, representing data from 1583 children. A model controlling for LENATM measures, age and publication type revealed an effect size of r_z= .186, indicating a small effect of SES on children’s language experiences. Th…
Covid-19 first lockdown as a window into language acquisition
The COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting closure of daycare centers worldwide, led to unprecedented changes in children’s learning environments. This period of increased time at home with caregivers, with limited access to external sources (e.g., daycares) provides a unique opportunity to examine the associations between the caregiver-child activities and children’s language development. The vocabularies of 1742 children aged 8-36 months across 1…
A Multilab Study of Bilingual Infants
From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) than adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet, IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multi-site study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants' IDS preference. As part of the …
Syntactic Prediction Adaptation Accounts for Language Processing and Language Learning
A previous study has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. In the current study, we investigated whether children could use this mechanism to disambiguate words whose interpretation as a noun or a verb is ambiguous. We tested 2- to 4-year-old French children using the phrase la petite followed by a homophone that could be interpreted as eith…
Priming syntactic ambiguity resolution in children and adults
Adults use their recent experience to disambiguate ambiguous sentences: Structures that haverecently been primed are favored in the resolution of different types of ambiguity, an example ofstructural priming. Research on children’s use of recent information for disambiguation is scarce.Using a forced-choice task with a tablet, we asked whether 5-6-year-old French-speakingchildren could also be primed in the resolution of attachment ambiguities, a…
Month-Olds Fail to Use Recent Experience to Infer the Syntactic Category of Novel Words
Infants are able to use the contexts in which familiar words appear to guide their inferences about the syntactic category of novel words (e.g., “This is a” + “dax” -> dax = object). The current study examined whether 18-month-old infants can rapidly adapt these expectations by tracking the distribution of syntactic structures in their input. In French, la petite can be followed by both nouns (la petite balle, “the little ball”) and verbs (la pet…
Syntactic Prediction Adaptation Accounts for Language Processing and Language Learning
A previous study has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. In the current study, we investigated whether children could use this mechanism to disambiguate words whose interpretation as a noun or a verb is ambiguous. We tested 2- to 4-year-old French children using the phrase la petite followed by a homophone that could be interpreted as eith…
The effect of older sibling, postnatal maternal stress, and household factors on language development in two- to four-year-old children
Previous literature has shown that family structure affects language development. Here, factors relating to older siblings (their presence in the house, sex, and age gap), mothers (maternal stress), and household size and residential crowding were assessed to systematically examine the different roles of these factors. Data from mother-child dyads in a Singaporean birth cohort, (677-855 dyads; 52% males; 58% to 61% Chinese, 20% to 24% Malay, 17% …
Literate and preliterate children show different learning patterns in an artificial language learning task
Minding the gaps
Can emergent literacy impact the size of the linguistic units children attend to? We examined children's ability to segment multiword sequences before and after they learned to read, in order to disentangle the effect of literacy and age on segmentation. We found that early readers were better at segmenting multiword units (after controlling for age, cognitive, and linguistic variables), and that improvement in literacy skills between the two ses…
Year-Old Children Rapidly Adapt Their Predictions and Use Them to Learn Novel Word Meanings
Adults create and update predictions about what speakers will say next. The current study asks whether prediction can drive language acquisition, by testing whether 3-4-year-old children (n=45) adapt to recent information when learning novel words. The study used a syntactic context which can precede both nouns and verbs to manipulate children’s predictions about what syntactic category will follow. Children for whom the syntactic context predict…
Three- to Four-Year-Old Children Rapidly Adapt Their Predictions and Use Them to Learn Novel Word Meanings
Adults create and update predictions about what speakers will say next. This study asks whether prediction can drive language acquisition, by testing whether 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 45) adapt to recent information when learning novel words. The study used a syntactic context which can precede both nouns and verbs to manipulate children's predictions about what syntactic category will follow. Children for whom the syntactic context predicte…
Literate and preliterate children show different learning patterns in an artificial language learning task
The Effect of Older Siblings on Language Development as a Function of Age Difference and Sex
The number of older siblings a child has is negatively correlated with the child’s verbal skills, perhaps because of competition for parents’ attention. In the current study, we examined the role of siblings’ sex and age gap as moderating factors, reasoning that they affect older siblings’ tendency to compensate for reduced parental attention. We hypothesized that children with an older sister have better language abilities than children with an …
The effect of siblings on language development as a function of age difference and sex
The number of older siblings a child has is negatively correlated with their verbal skills, perhaps due to competition for parents’ attention. The current study examined the role of siblings’ sex and age gap as moderating factors, reasoning that they affect older siblings’ tendency to compensate for reduced parental attention. We hypothesized that children with an older sister, especially with a large age gap, have better language abilities than …
Priming syntactic ambiguity resolution in children and adults
Adults use their recent experience to disambiguate ambiguous sentences: Structures that haverecently been primed are favored in the resolution of different types of ambiguity, an example ofstructural priming. Research on children’s use of recent information for disambiguation is scarce.Using a forced-choice task with a tablet, we asked whether 5-6-year-old French-speakingchildren could also be primed in the resolution of attachment ambiguities, a…
Month-Olds Fail to Use Recent Experience to Infer the Syntactic Category of Novel Words
Infants are able to use the contexts in which familiar words appear to guide their inferences about the syntactic category of novel words (e.g., “This is a” + “dax” -> dax = object). The current study examined whether 18-month-old infants can rapidly adapt these expectations by tracking the distribution of syntactic structures in their input. In French, la petite can be followed by both nouns (la petite balle, “the little ball”) and verbs (la pet…
Month‐olds Fail to Use Recent Experience to Infer the Syntactic Category of Novel Words
Infants are able to use the contexts in which familiar words appear to guide their inferences about the syntactic category of novel words (e.g. 'This is a' + 'dax' -> dax = object). The current study examined whether 18-month-old infants can rapidly adapt these expectations by tracking the distribution of syntactic structures in their input. In French, la petite can be followed by both nouns (la petite balle, 'the little ball') and verbs (la peti…
Starting Big
Multiword units play an important role in language learning and use. It was proposed that learning from such units can facilitate mastery of certain grammatical relations, and that children and adults differ in their use of multiword units during learning, contributing to their varying language-learning trajectories. Accordingly, adults learn gender agreement when encouraged to learn from multiword units. Previous work has not examined two core p…
Year-Old Children Adapt to the Reliability of Conflicting Sources of Information to Learn Novel Words
A central challenge in language acquisition is the integration of multiple sources of information, potentially in conflict, to acquire new knowledge and adjust current linguistic representations. One way to accomplish this is to assign more weight to more reliable sources of information in context. We test the hypothesis that children adjust the weight of different sources of information during learning, considering two specific sources of inform…
A multi-lab study of bilingual infants
From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) than adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet, IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multi-site study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants’ IDS preference. As part of the …
Quantifying Sources of Variability in Infancy Research Using the Infant-Directed-Speech Preference
Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multisite study aimed at (a) as…
Starting Big
Multiword units play an important role in language learning and use. It was proposed that learning from such units can facilitate mastery of certain grammatical relations, and that children and adults differ in their use of multiword units during learning, contributing to their varying language-learning trajectories. Accordingly, adults learn gender agreement better when encouraged to learn from multiword units. Previous work has not examined two…
Preregistration in infant research—A primer
Preregistration, the act of specifying a research plan in advance, is becoming more common in scientific research. Infant researchers contend with unique problems that might make preregistration particularly challenging. Infants are a hard‐to‐reach population, usually yielding small sample sizes, they can only complete a limited number of trials, and they can be excluded based on hard‐to‐predict complications (e.g., parental interference, fussine…
“The tiger is hitting! the duck too!” 3-year-olds can use prosodic information to constrain their interpretation of ellipsis
Syntactic prediction adaptation accounts for language processing and language learning
Previous literature has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions, and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. The current study tested whether they could use this mechanism to disambiguate words that are ambiguous between a noun and a verbinterpretation. We tested two-to-four-year-old French children using the phrase la petite followed by a homophone that could be interpreted as either a…
Socioeconomic status correlates with measures of Language ENvironment Analysis (Lena) system
Using a meta-analytic approach, we evaluate the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and children’s experiences measured with the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system. Our final analysis included 22 independent samples, representing data from 1583 children. A model controlling for LENATM measures, age and publication type revealed an effect size of r_z= .186, indicating a small effect of SES on children’s language experiences. Th…
Covid-19 first lockdown as a window into language acquisition
The COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting closure of daycare centers worldwide, led to unprecedented changes in children’s learning environments. This period of increased time at home with caregivers, with limited access to external sources (e.g., daycares) provides a unique opportunity to examine the associations between the caregiver-child activities and children’s language development. The vocabularies of 1742 children aged 8-36 months across 1…
A Multilab Study of Bilingual Infants
From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) than adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet, IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multi-site study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants' IDS preference. As part of the …
Syntactic Prediction Adaptation Accounts for Language Processing and Language Learning
A previous study has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. In the current study, we investigated whether children could use this mechanism to disambiguate words whose interpretation as a noun or a verb is ambiguous. We tested 2- to 4-year-old French children using the phrase la petite followed by a homophone that could be interpreted as eith…
Socioeconomic status correlates with measures of Language Environment Analysis (Lena) system
Using a meta-analytic approach, we evaluate the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and children's experiences measured with the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system. Our final analysis included 22 independent samples, representing data from 1583 children. A model controlling for LENA TM measures, age and publication type revealed an effect size of r z = .186, indicating a small effect of SES on children's language experiences. …
Community-set goals are needed to increase diversity in language acquisition research
This commentary argues that to increase diversity in language acquisition research, the field should define specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-defined goals, and prioritize solutions based on their importance, tractability, and neglectedness, ideally in collaboration with a variety of other agents outside the research community
The Influence Of Sibship Composition On Language Development At Age 2 years in the Elfe birth cohort study
Using data from 12,296 children (49.3% female) from the French ELFE birth cohort, we analyzed the effect of various characteristics of the siblings on children’s expressive vocabulary. Children’s vocabulary at age 2 years was negatively associated with the number of older siblings (-.08 SD per additional sibling), and this effect was partly mediated by parental interactions. In an analysis restricted to children with one older sibling, the vocabu…
Learning to predict and predicting to learn
Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down itsprobable meaning. This is syntactic bootstrapping. A learner that uses syntacticbootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semanticinformation that a syntactic context provides. Based on the semantic seed hypothesis,children discover the semantic predictiveness of syntactic contexts by tracking thedistribution of familiar words. We p…
Psychology (34 works) · Language Development and Disorders (32 works) · Linguistics (24 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (19 works) · Computer Science (18 works) · Developmental psychology (15 works) · Artificial Intelligence (13 works) · Cognitive psychology (11 works) · Language acquisition (11 works) · Noun (11 works)