{"doi":"10.1111/cdep.12373","title":"The Comprehension Boost in Early Word Learning: Older Infants Are Better Learners","abstract":"Recent research has revealed that infants begin understanding words at around 6 months. After that, infants' comprehension vocabulary increases gradually in a linear way over 8-18 months, according to data from parental checklists. In contrast, infants' word comprehension improves robustly, qualitatively, and in a nonlinear way just after their first birthday, according to data from studies on spoken word comprehension. In this review, I integrate observational and experimental data to explain these divergent results. I argue that infants' comprehension boost is not well-explained by changes in their language input for common words, but rather by proposing that they learn to take better advantage of relatively stable input data. Next, I propose potentially complementary theoretical accounts of what makes older infants better learners. Finally, I suggest how the research community can expand our empirical base in this understudied area, and why doing so will inform our knowledge about child development.","journal":"Child Development Perspectives","year":2020,"id":57299,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":79,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9527,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":231346,"name":"Elika Bergelson","orcid":"0000-0003-2742-4797","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":50,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T21:06:31.136481Z","pmid":"33569084","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}