Do young children learn words from the company they keep?

The challenge of early word learning is often framed as one of individually mapping words to their referents. Yet children do not experience words just as individual labels, but as parts of broader language contexts, such as conversations and stories. In principle, word contexts might support word learning because words similar in meaning tend to occur in similar contexts. Thus, a child who knows some fruit words and has heard them in the context of "juicy" might learn that a "juicy mango" is also a fruit even without ever seeing a mango. Although children can use such contextual support to learn words in the lab, we do not know whether they harness contextual support in everyday language for real-world word learning. We quantified words’ contextual support in children’s everyday language input and found that it reliably predicted normative word learning, even accounting for other established predictors such as word frequency.