To learn language, children must map variable input to categories such as phones and words. How do children process variation and distinguish between variable pronunciations ("shoup" for "soup") versus new words? The unique sensory experience of children with cochlear implants, who learn speech through their device's degraded…

The current study investigated whether age-related changes in the conceptualization of social groups influences interpretation of the pronoun we. Sixty-four 2- and 4-year-olds (N = 29 female, 50 White-identifying) viewed scenarios in which it was ambiguous how many puppets performed an activity together. When asked who performed the activity, a…

By age 2, children are developing foundational language processing skills, such as quickly recognizing words and predicting words before they occur. How do these skills relate to children's structural knowledge of vocabulary? Multiple aspects of language processing were simultaneously measured in a sample of 2-to-5-year-olds (N = 215): While older…

In communicative situations, preschoolers use shared knowledge, or "common ground," to guide their interpretation of a speaker's referential intent. Using eye-tracking measures, this study investigated the time course of 4-year-olds' (n = 95) use of two different speakers' perspectives and assessed how individual differences in this…

When referring to objects, adults package words, sentences, and gestures in ways that shape children's learning. Here, to understand how continuity of reference shapes word learning, an adult taught new words to 4-year-old children (N = 120) using either clusters of references to the same object or no sequential references to each object. In three…

Speech disfluencies can convey information to listeners: Adults and children predict that filled pauses (e.g., "uhh") will be followed by referents that are difficult to describe or are new to the discourse. In adults, this is driven partly by an understanding that disfluencies reflect processing difficulties. This experiment examined…

Four tasks (N = 191, 3- to 6-year-olds) examined the effect of instrumental versus conventional language cues on children's imitative fidelity of a necklace-making activity, their memory and transmission of the activity, and their perceptions of functional fixedness. Children in the conventional condition imitated with higher fidelity, transmitted…

Using a novel emotional perspective-taking task, this study investigated 4-year-olds' (n = 97) use of a speaker's emotional prosody to make inferences about the speaker's emotional state and, correspondingly, their communicative intent. Eye gaze measures indicated preschoolers used emotional perspective inferences to guide their real-time…

A crucial part of language development is learning how various social and contextual language-external factors constrain an utterance's meaning. This learning process is poorly understood. Five experiments addressed one hundred thirty-one 3- to 5-year-old children's use of one such socially relevant information source: talker characteristics.…

Generic sentences (e.g., "Birds lay eggs") convey generalizations about entire categories and may thus be an important source of knowledge for children. However, these sentences cannot be identified by a simple rule, requiring instead the integration of multiple cues. The present studies focused on 3- to 5-year-olds' (N = 91) use of…

For socially appropriate communication, speakers must command a variety of linguistic styles, or "registers", that vary according to social context and social relationships. This study examined preschool children's ability to use a speaker's register choice to infer the identity of their addressee. Four-year-olds could draw correct inferences…

When can children speaking Japanese, English, or Chinese map and extend novel nouns and verbs? Across 6 studies, 3- and 5-year-old children in all 3 languages map and extend novel nouns more readily than novel verbs. This finding prevails even in languages like Chinese and Japanese that are assumed to be verb-friendly languages (e.g., T. Tardif,…

Results from these two studies show that fast mapping--gaining information about a word from how it is used in a sentence, what words it is contrasted with, and other factors--can be used successfully by children two to four years old to form quick and rough hypotheses about the meaning of a word. (PCB)

When preschool children think of objects as organized into collections (e.g., forest, army) they solve certain problems better than when they think of the same objects as organized into classes (e.g., trees, soldiers). Present studies indicate preschool children occasionally distort natural language inclusion hierarchies (e.g., oak, tree) into the…

Investigates whether patient animacy affected the acquisition of the passive construction of syntax of 32 children aged two-five years. Results indicate that children who were taught the passive with animate patients produced more passives in the teaching phase than did comparable children who received inanimate patients. (RJC)