The present study examined the developmental origin of "blue lies", a pervasive form of lying in the adult world that is told purportedly to benefit a collective. Seven, 9-, and 11-year-old Chinese children were surreptitiously placed in a real-life situation where they decided whether to lie to conceal their group's cheating behavior. Children…

The McGurk effect paradigm was used to examine the developmental onset of inter-language differences between Japanese and English in auditory-visual speech perception. Participants were asked to identify syllables in audiovisual (with congruent or discrepant auditory and visual components), audio-only, and video-only presentations at various…

Some recent publications that explore the foundations of early language development are reviewed in this article. The review adopts the pivotal idea that infants' advancements are helped by the existence of different types of biases. The infant's discovery of the phonological properties of the language of the environment, as well as their learning…

Two alternative accounts have been proposed to explain the role of gestures in thinking and speaking. The Information Packaging Hypothesis (Kita, 2000) claims that gestures are important for the conceptual packaging of information before it is coded into a linguistic form for speech. The Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis (Rauscher, Krauss & Chen, 1996)…

Cardiac disease is the most common congenital defect in children, affecting between 3 and 10 in every 1000 live births. While significant advances in medical and surgical management have resulted in increasing numbers of survivors, it is also recognized that there is a growing population of children living with neurological impairment and lowered…

There is controversy over the basis for young children's experience of themselves and other people as separate yet related individuals, each with a mental perspective on the world--and over the nature of corresponding deficits in autism. Here we tested a form of self-other connectedness (identification) in children with and without autism, who…

Recent studies have reported that preverbal infants are able to discriminate between numerosities of sets presented within a particular modality. There is still debate, however, over whether they are able to perform intermodal numerosity matching, i.e. to relate numerosities of sets presented with different sensory modalities. The present study…

Absent reference comprehension is a critical achievement of early development, yet little is known about its emergence. In the current study, 12- and 16-month-old infants' recognition of properties of mentioned absent things was used as an index of absent reference comprehension. Infants were presented with displays matching the color and prior…

Recent research has shown that infants are sensitive to mispronunciations of words when tested using a preferential looking task. The results of these studies indicate that infants are able to access the phonological detail of words when engaged in lexical recognition. However, most of this work has focused on mispronunciations of consonants in…

The ability to perceive and produce sounds at multiple time scales is a skill necessary for the acquisition of language. Unlike speech perception, which develops early in life, the production of speech sounds starts at a few months and continues into late childhood with the development of speech-motor skills. Though there is detailed information…

Williams syndrome (WS) is a genetic disorder associated with severe visuocognitive impairment. Individuals with WS also report difficulties with everyday wayfinding. To study the development of body-, environment-, and object-based spatial frames of reference in WS, we tested 45 children and adults with WS on a search task in which the participant…

In the present work, we developed a database of nonlinguistic sounds that mirror prosodic characteristics typical of language and thus carry affective information, but do not convey linguistic information. In a dichotic-listening task, we used these novel stimuli as a means of disambiguating the relative contributions of linguistic and affective…

This paper presents autoassociator neural networks. A first section reviews the architecture of these models, common learning rules, and presents sample simulations to illustrate their abilities. In a second section, the ability of these models to account for learning phenomena such as habituation is reviewed. The contribution of these networks to…

Socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with childhood cognitive achievement. In previous research we found that this association shows neural specificity; specifically we found that groups of low and middle SES children differed disproportionately in perisylvian/language and prefrontal/executive abilities relative to other neurocognitive…

What are the essential properties of human intelligence, currently unparalleled in its power relative to other biological forms and relative to artificial forms of intelligence? We suggest that answering this question depends critically on understanding developmental process. This paper considers three principles potentially essential to building…