Four experiments investigated 3-year-olds' understanding of the differential importance of shape for categorizing solid objects. Found that they categorized rigid and deformable objects differently in a non-naming task and knew that material was important for deformable items and shape for rigid items. In two naming tasks, they generalized names…

Examined influence of object labels and shape similarity on 16- to 21-month-olds' inferences. Found that infants generalized non-obvious property of unlabeled objects to test objects with highly similar shapes. For objects labeled with novel nouns, infants relied on shape similarity and shared labels to generalize properties. For objects labeled…

Examined children's tendency to make argument structure overgeneralization errors. Found that 3- to 8-year-olds were more likely to overgeneralize verbs less familiar to them, supporting the hypothesis that verb usage in particular construction types becomes entrenched over time. As children learn transitivity status of particular verbs, they…

Examined preschoolers' ability to map novel adjectives to object properties in two experiments. Found that 4-year-olds could extend novel adjectives from target to matching test object whether objects were drawn from same, or different, basic level categories. If 3-year-olds' first extended a novel adjective to objects in the same basic level…

Three studies explored whether children's tendency to extend object names on the basis of sameness of shape (shape bias) is specific to naming. Findings indicated that 2- and 3-year-olds showed shape bias both when asked to extend a novel name and when asked to select an object of the same kind as a target object; 3-year-olds also showed shape…

The research literature on children's production of elaborations in associative learning tasks is reviewed, especially with respect to the questions of when children can produce elaborations under instruction, when they transfer elaborative strategy usage from one situation to another, and when they produce elaborative strategies spontaneously.…