Grammatical gender is generally considered an early and error-free acquisition in French children. This article first examines how children cope with the gender attribution problem, "i.e.", how they determine the gender of individual nouns. We consider the plausibility and requirements of an account in which tacit phonological assignment rules are…

Act-out and intermodal preferential looking (IPL) tasks were administered to 67 English children aged 2-0, 2-9 and 3-5 to assess their comprehension of canonical SVO transitive word order with both familiar and novel verbs. Children at 3-5 and at 2-9 showed evidence of comprehending word order in both verb conditions and both tasks, although…

Upon witnessing a causal event, do children's gestures encode causal knowledge that (a) does not appear in their linguistic descriptions or (b) conveys the same information as their sentential expressions? The former use of gesture is considered supplementary; the latter is considered reinforcing. Sixty-four English-speaking children aged 2.5-5…

Parent-child conversations are a potential source of children's developing understanding of the biological domain. We investigated patterns in parent-child conversations that may inform children about biological domain boundaries. At a marine science center exhibit, we compared parent-child talk about typical sea animals with faces (fish) with…

Adolescents (N = 46; M = 12.46 years) who had previously participated in a longitudinal study of autobiographical memory development narrated their early childhood memories, interpreted life events, and completed a family history questionnaire and language assessment. Three distinct components of adolescent memory emerged: (1) age of earliest…

In many cognitive domains, learning is more effective when exemplars are distributed over a number of sessions than when they are all presented within one session. The present study investigated this "distributed learning effect" with respect to English-speaking children's acquisition of a complex grammatical construction. Forty-eight children…