The word learning literature points to the influence of many kinds of environmental cues that
infants and young children detect and then effectively apply to guide their acquisition of new words.
The evidence in this area has focused on the cues that learners use to determine what words refer to.
One example of this is the shape bias; detecting patterns in the objects and object names in the environment leads to the development of the shape bias, which helps infants to extend new object names
appropriately