Calendar of events

Title: Children's personal interests shape their language development

Abstract: Over the first two years of life, children’s vocabularies grow rapidly and by 30 months, children produce more than 400 words (Frank et al., 2017). Notably, despite the presence of a shared vocabulary, the specific words which young children learn are highly idiosyncratic, reflecting the unique interests and experiences that shape their language development. In my talk, I will present work on how children’s personal preferences and interests influence their learning. Our research has shown that children learn preferably what they find more interesting in the moment (Eiteljoerge et al., 2020, 2025). Furthermore, they learn and retain novel word-object associations when they are interested in the category the novel object belongs to (Ackermann et al., 2020, 2023). Moreover, in the absence of other cues, children use their own interests to decide with which novel object a novel label should be associated with (Ackermann, Eiteljoerge et al., 2025). On-going research will extend these findings to investigate the influence of personal interests on word learning in adults, using a trivia questions paradigm to explore whether this learning strategy can still be observed in adulthood. Overall, these findings suggest that children's interests play a critical role in shaping their language learning and highlight the importance of considering individual interests and motivations in the development of language learning strategies.