1. Meta-Analysis of the Shape bias as a word learning strategy

Although well-studied for some time now, with creative studies and experiments that provided so many insights into how young children acquire early words (mostly nouns) and use them. The early word learning and generalization literature has been quite hard to consolidate and thus build upon, given the heterogeneous approaches, procedures, and measures employed to study the phenomenon.

We try to have a better understanding of this research question of what underlies children's concepts of early words by using a meta-analytic approach to synthesize evidence, as well as look for covariates that moderate the variation we see in the literature. This will enable us to better assess and adjudicate different theoretical explanations of phenomena like the well-studied shape bias. A common and grounding potential learning bias that facilitates vocabulary development.

Check: Abdelrahim, S. O, & Frank, M. C. (2024). Examining the robustness and generalizability of the shape bias: a meta-analysis. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46. Read here

2. Do variations in early lexical statistics explain the cross-cultural differences in word extension literature?

The word extension shape bias is found by various studies to be different in English-speaking US children, compared to east asian language speakers. Is it due to different regularities in early vocabulary?

Check: Abdelrahim, S. O, & Frank, M. C. (2024). Limited cross-linguistic variation in the lexical statistics of nouns in early vocabulary (BUCLD49 2024, Boston, USA)

Check: Lexical Statistics in Early Noun Vocabularies: A Cross-Linguistic and Rater-Origin Perspective. Samah Abdelrahim, Jongmin Jung, Claire Lee, Eon-Suk Ko, Michael Frank (BUCLD50 2025, Boston, USA)

3. Measurement of the shape bias: Age, stimuli, and procedure variation

Check: Investigating heterogeneity in shape bias: a study on procedural, stimuli, and age-related variations. Samah Abdelrahim, Sadio Abdi, Meesha Ryan, Michael Frank (The 15th Annual BCCCD Conference, January 9-11 2025 - BCCCD25) (YouTube video here)

4. What exactly is a complex object? And what does complexity even mean? implications on early word learning

Coming soon...