Infants' representations of physical events are surprisingly flexible. Brief exposure to one event can immediately enhance infants' representations of another event. The present experiments tested two potential mechanisms underlying this priming: enhanced encoding or improved retrieval. Five-month-olds saw a target block become hidden inside a…

Recent studies have established that even infants can determine what others know based on previous visual experience. In the current study, we investigated whether 2-and 3-year-olds know what others know based on previous auditory experience. A child and an adult heard the sound of one object together, but only the child heard the sound of another…

The ability to recognize common objects from sparse information about geometric shape emerges during the same period in which children learn object names and object categories. Hummel and Biederman's (1992) theory of object recognition proposes that the geometric shapes of objects have two components--geometric volumes representing major object…

This study investigates the importance of object function (action-object-outcome relations) on object individuation in infancy. Five experiments examined the ability of 9.5- and 12-month-old infants to individuate simple geometric objects in a manual search design. Experiments 1 through 4 (12-month-olds, N = 128) provided several combinations of…

A long history of research has considered the role of iconicity in language and the existence and role of nonarbitrary properties in language and the use of language. Previous studies with Japanese-speaking children, whose language defines a large grammatical class of words with clear sound symbolism, suggest that iconicity properties in Japanese…

This research investigated the extent and nature of the informational support that enables young children to understand pictures as symbols. Two experiments were conducted using an object-retrieval task. The first experiment varied the amount (complete and no instructions) and kind of information (intended function of the symbol and…

Two-year-olds' appreciation of the shared nature of object labels versus object preferences was examined in 2 studies. A total of 128 24- to 27-month-olds played a finding game with an experimenter during which they were taught a piece of information about a target object in a nonostensive learning context. In Experiment 1, children were presented…