Errors differ in degree of seriousness. We asked whether preschoolers would use the magnitude of an informant's errors to decide if that informant would be a good source of information later. Four- and 5-year-olds observed two informants incorrectly label familiar objects, but one informant's errors were closer to the correct answer than the…

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…

Can 6- and 8-year-olds (and adults) comprehend common instrument verbs when extended to novel situations? Participants heard eight unusual extensions of common verbs and were asked to paraphrase the verbs' meanings. Half of the verbs used were "specified instrument" verbs that include the name of the instrument used to perform the action (e.g., a…

Three studies using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm examined onset of productive comprehension of tense/aspect morphology in English. When can toddlers understand these forms with novel verbs and novel events? The first study used familiar verbs and showed that 26-36-month olds correctly matched a past/perfective form ("-ed" or…

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…

Used a framework-isolating analysis of knowledge and control of processing components to investigate preschoolers' acquisition of cardinality. Found that cardinality emerges gradually in children between ages three and five. Also, tasks that increase the processing burden of a basic counting problem by adding demands for either analysis or control…

Describes an ethnographic study of African American toddlers and families that focused on children's productive competence in naturally occurring narrativelike conversation. Examines emergence of narrative competence; posits definition incorporating minimal requirements for child participation within the fundamental essence of narrative structure.…

Study 1 explored associations between multiple measures of language and symbolic gesture development across ages 3 and 4; Study 2 measured more finely which aspects of language relate to the symbolic representation of actions with objects, and explored associations between symbolic gesture and general intellectual ability. Results showed…

Four experiments with 36 infants studied how children organize objects categorically in the absence of input. Outcomes were not consistent with the predictions of bias accounts and considerably weaken the case for a psychologically real noun-bias prior to the vocabulary explosion. Findings are more consistent with children's use of information as…

Reviews "The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language" (S. Pinker). Defines generative grammar, examines the evidence for Pinker's Generative Grammar as Instinct hypothesis, and discusses Pinker's use of language acquisition as support for the hypothesis. Suggests alternative theories of language that begin from different…

Attempts to determine whether children can use social-pragmatic cues to determine "what kind" of referent, object, or action an adult intends to indicate with a novel word. Doubts that children assume that a novel word refers to whatever nameless object is present. Suggests that lexical acquisition rests fundamentally on children's…

Examines whether knowledge of functional properties of a referent for a new name influences children's first guesses about whether that name refers to an object or a substance. Suggests that children do not rely on a single source of information, but rather draw on various kind of information, including perceptual characteristics of the entities…

Studied semantic and cognitive development of Korean-speaking and English-speaking children. Found that categorization and a naming spurt emerged later in Korean speakers than in English speakers, while means-ends abilities and success/failure words emerged earlier in Korean speakers than in English speakers. Also, Korean-speaking mothers…