Toddler language learning: Richer and more complicated than you might think When you consider how children learn words, you might think of this kind of scenario: an adult points to an object (for example, a dog), clearly says a word in isolation (dog!), and the child immediately understands what the word means. Almost everything about this scenario is wrong! The meaning of a word is not obvious. Most words occur in longer sentences without any spaces before or after them, which means that where a word begins or ends is not clear. And children work out the meanings of words over a longer period of time, rather than all at once. In our Lab for Infant Development and Language at the University of Waterloo, our research has examined how toddlers deal with another complicated aspect of word learning: that of speech variability. Children understanding other children Speech variability refers to the fact that a word like dog is pronounced differently every time we hear it. Even a si...