Although stories for children often feature supernatural and fantastical events, children themselves often prefer realistic events when choosing what should happen in a story. In two experiments, we investigated whether 3- to 5-year-olds (total N = 240 from diverse backgrounds) might be more likely to include fantastical events in stories about…

Increasing evidence suggests that success in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is not only dependent upon one's actual STEM-relevant abilities but also upon one's STEM-relevant attitudes--in particular, math and spatial attitudes. Here, we examine whether simply mentioning the math or spatial relevance of a task affects…

Upon hearing a novel label, listeners tend to assume that it refers to a novel, rather than a familiar object. While this disambiguation or mutual exclusivity (ME) effect has been robustly shown across development, it is unclear what it involves. Do listeners use their pragmatic and lexical knowledge to exclude the familiar object and thus select…