The integrated use of spatial and temporal information seems to support the separation of two sensory streams. The present study tested whether this facilitation depends on the encoding of sensory stimuli in externally anchored spatial coordinate systems. Fifty-nine children between 5 and 12 years as well as 12 young adults performed a crossmodal…

Research on age-related cognitive change traditionally focuses on either development or aging, where development ends with adulthood and aging begins around 55 years. This approach ignores age-related changes during the 35 years in-between, implying that this period is uninformative. Here we investigated face recognition as an ability that may…

The world's languages draw on a common set of event components for their verb systems. Yet, these components are differentially distributed across languages. At what age do children begin to use language-specific patterns to narrow possible verb meanings? English-, Japanese-, and Spanish-speaking adults, toddlers, and preschoolers were shown…

The present paper re-appraises connectionist attempts to explain how human cognitive development appears to progress through a series of sequential stages. Models of performance on the Piagetian balance scale task are the focus of attention. Limitations of these models are discussed and replications and extensions to the work are provided via the…

Generic sentences (such as "Birds lay eggs") are important in that they refer to kinds (e.g., birds as a group) rather than individuals (e.g., the birds in the henhouse). The present set of studies examined aspects of how generic nouns are understood by English speakers. Adults and children (4- and 5-year-olds) were presented with scenarios about…

Three experiments investigated 14-month olds' capacity for superordinate-level inductions, using animal and vehicle domains. Found that infants did generalize properties in these domains, and that their inductions were more influenced by conceptual category than by perceptual similarity. (HTH)

Two experiments yield data suggesting that the structure of children's concept of artifact function changes profoundly between age 5 and 7, with striking effects on problem-solving performance. This effect is not caused by differences in children's knowledge about the typical use of particular tools, but rather, is mediated by the structure of the…

Two experiments examined development of the ordinality concept in infants. Found that 11-month-olds successfully discriminated, whereas 9-month-olds failed to discriminate sequences that descended in numerical value from sequences increasing in numerical value. Nine-month-olds could discriminate the ordinal direction of sequences that varied in…

Presents evidence that the supposed paradox in which infants find abstract patterns in speech-like stimuli whereas even some preschoolers struggle to find abstract syntactic patterns within meaningful language is no paradox. Asserts that all research evidence shows that young children's syntactic constructions become abstract in a piecemeal…

Asserts that the posited paradox between infancy and toddlerhood language was not eliminated by Tomasello and Akhtar's appeal to infants' robust statistical learning abilities. Maintains that scrutiny of their studies supports the resolution that abstracting linguistic form is easy for infants and that toddlers find it difficult to integrate…

Three experiments explored change toward more flexible reliance on combinations of spatial and nonspatial landmark information to reorient oneself. Identified 5-7 years as age for this developmental change. Results suggest that language production skills play a causal role in allowing humans to construct novel representations rapidly, which can…

Children and undergraduate students were studied to expose "structure-neutral" interpretations of logical propositions involving universal affirmatives. Successes with true and false questions and with four different syllogistic forms having three content types were compared. Age-related differences in performance were discussed with…

Conservation judgments are based on a combination of logical necessity and empirical belief. Results of two experiments support the view that the logical aspect of conservation is developmentally stable, while the empirical aspect varies widely across problems and individuals because of its dependence on relevant experience. (Author/RD)