Previous research has documented that children count spatiotemporally-distinct partial objects as if they were whole objects. This behavior extends beyond counting to inclusion of partial objects in assessment and comparisons of quantities. Multiple accounts of this performance have been proposed: children and adults differ qualitatively in their…

Three- and four-year-old children were asked predicate-focus questions ("What's X doing?") about a scene in which an agent performed an action on a patient. We varied: (i) whether (or not) the preceding discourse context, which established the patient as given information, was available for the questioner; and (ii) whether (or not) the patient was…

Considered whether modeling and the type of an adult's request influenced children's ability at age 1 year and 8 months and 2 years and 2 months to comprehend gestures and replica objects as symbols for familiar objects. Evaluated whether modeling and type of request influenced children's ability at 1 year and 8 months to understand familiar…

Explores the interaction between the timing of verb models and the focus of the events to which they refer on verb learning by children. Findings revealed that the movement verb was learned better in the impending condition and the result verb in the completed condition. (seven references) (Author/CK)

The role of cognitive and linguistic individual differences as well as contextual factors and processing complexity were examined as determinants of pronoun reversal (I/you). It is proposed that pronoun reversals commonly result from a failure to perform a deicitic shift, which is especially likely when children's psycholinguistic processing…

Investigates the potential interaction of conceptual representations and linguistic systems during language acquisition. The study examined language-thought interactions in American, Finnish and Polish children, focusing on the conceptual and linguistic development of space and time. Findings reveal that spatial and temporal linguistic systems and…