Previous evidence suggests that children's mastery of prosodic modulations to signal the informational status of discourse referents emerges quite late in development. In the present study, we investigate the children's use of head gestures as it compares to prosodic cues to signal a referent as being contrastive relative to a set of possible…

The present research examined the consequences of telling young children they have a reputation for being smart. Of interest was how this would affect their willingness to resist the temptation to cheat for personal gain as assessed by a temptation resistance task, in which children promised not to cheat in the game. Two studies with 3- and…

Bilingual infants from 6- to 24-months of age are more likely to generalize, flexibly reproducing actions on novel objects significantly more often than age-matched monolingual infants are. In the current study, we examine whether the addition of novel verbal labels enhances memory generalization in a perceptually complex imitation task. We…

Research has demonstrated a bilingual advantage in how young children use referential cues such as eye gaze and pointing gesture to locate an object or to categorize objects. This study investigated the use of referential cues (i.e. eye gaze) in fast mapping in three groups of children that differed in their language exposure. One hundred and…

The emergence of strategic verbal rehearsal at around 7 years of age is widely considered a major milestone in descriptions of the development of short-term memory across childhood. Likewise, rehearsal is believed by many to be a crucial factor in explaining why memory improves with age. This apparent qualitative shift in mnemonic processes has…

Do words cue children's visual attention, and if so, what are the relevant mechanisms? Across four experiments, 3-year-old children (N = 163) were tested in visual search tasks in which targets were cued with only a visual preview versus a visual preview and a spoken name. The experiments were designed to determine whether labels facilitated…

In the present study we examined whether children with Developmental Dyscalculia (DD) exhibit a deficit in the so-called "Approximate Number System" (ANS). To do so, we examined a group of elementary school children who demonstrated persistent low math achievement over 4 years and compared them to typically developing (TD), aged-matched…

The current study investigates the degree to which preschoolers can engage in causal inferences in a blocking paradigm, a paradigm in which a cue is consistently linked with a target, either alone (A-T) or paired with another cue (AB-T). Unlike previous blocking studies with preschoolers, we manipulated the causal structure of the events without…

The ability to navigate new environments has a significant impact on the daily life and independence of people with learning difficulties. The aims of this study were to investigate the development of route learning in Down syndrome (N = 50), Williams syndrome (N = 19), and typically developing children between 5 and 11 years old (N = 108); to…

The present study tested infants' ability to assess and compare quantities of a food substance. Contrary to previous findings, the results suggest that by 10 months of age infants can quantify non-cohesive substances, and that this ability is different in important ways from their ability to quantify discrete objects: (1) In contrast to even much…

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to examine functional anatomy of attention to social (eye gaze) and nonsocial (arrow) communicative stimuli in late childhood and in a disorder defined by atypical processing of social stimuli, Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Children responded to a target word ("LEFT"/"RIGHT") in the context of a…

Word segmentation, detecting word boundaries in continuous speech, is a fundamental aspect of language learning that can occur solely by the computation of statistical and speech cues. Fifty-four children underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while listening to three streams of concatenated syllables that contained either high…

Theories of autism have proposed that a bias towards low-level perceptual information, or a featural/surface-biased information-processing style, may compromise higher-level language processing in such individuals. Two experiments, utilizing linguistic stimuli with competing low-level/perceptual and high-level/semantic information, tested…

Neurological and behavioral findings indicate that atypical auditory processing characterizes autism. The present study tested the hypothesis that auditory processing is less domain-specific in autism than in typical development. Participants with autism and controls completed a pitch sequence discrimination task in which same/different judgments…