This research investigates the development of constraints in word learning. Previous experiments have shown that as infants gain more knowledge of native language structure, they become more selective about the forms that they accept as labels. However, the developmental pattern exhibited depends greatly on the way that infants are introduced to…

Children learning a verb may benefit from hearing it across situations . At the same time, in everyday contexts, situations in which a verb is heard will be interrupted by distracting events. Using Structural Alignment theory as a framework, Study 1 asks whether children can learn a verb when irrelevant, interleaved events are present. Two½- and…

Fourteen-month-olds selectively imitated a sub-efficient means (illuminating a lightbox by a head-touch) when this was modeled by linguistic ingroup members in video-demonstrations. A follow-up study with slightly older infants, however, could replicate this effect only in a video-demonstration context. Hence it still remains unclear whether…

Contrast information could be useful for verb learning, but few studies have examined children's ability to use this type of information. Contrast may be useful when children are told explicitly that different verbs apply, or when they hear two different verbs in a single context. Three studies examine children's attention to different types of…

Word learning is a lifelong activity constrained by cognitive biases that people possess at particular points in development. Age of acquisition (AoA) is a psycholinguistic variable that may prove useful toward gauging the relative weighting of different phonological, semantic, and morphological factors at different phases of language acquisition…

In two experiments, one hundred ninety-two 3-year-olds, 4-year-olds, and adults heard a novel word for a target object and then were asked to extend the label to one of two test objects, one matching in shape-based object category (the shape match) and the other matching in a property other than shape (the property match). We independently…

Two experiments investigated how young children and adults understand whether objects are "by" a landmark and remember their locations. Three- and 4-year-old children and adults were asked to judge whether several blocks were "by" a landmark. The blocks were arranged so that their absolute and relative distances from the landmark varied. Later,…

In 4 experiments, we examined 16- and 20-month-old infants' understanding of proper names and count nouns. In each experiment, infants were taught a novel word modeled linguistically as either a proper name (e.g., "DAXY") or a count noun (e.g., "a DAXY") for a stuffed animal shown on a puppet stage. This animal was moved to a new location on the…

As the articles in this issue attest, U-shaped curves in development have stimulated a wide spectrum of research across disparate task domains and age groups and have provoked a variety of ideas about their origins and theoretical significance. In the authors' view, the ubiquity of the general pattern suggests that U-shaped curves can arise from…

The development of the "inversion" effect in face processing was examined in infants 3 to 6 months of age by testing their integration of the internal and external features of upright and inverted faces using a variation of the "switch" visual habituation paradigm. When combined with previous findings showing that 7-month-olds use integrative…

The aim of this article is to introduce readers to an alternative way of applying U-shaped functions to understand development, especially cognitive development. In classical developmental applications, age is the abscissa; that is, in the fundamental equation B = f(A), some behavioral variable (B) plots as a U-shaped or inverted U-shaped function…

The traditional view of development is stage-like progress toward increasing complexity of form. However, the literature cites many examples in which children do worse before they do better. A major challenge for developmental theory, therefore, is to explain both global progress and apparent regression. In this article, we situate U-shaped…