This study investigated the development of rapid visual object categorization. N = 20 adults (Experiment 1), N = 21 five to six-year-old children (Experiment 2), and N = 140 four-, seven-, and eleven-month-old infants (Experiment 3; all predominantly White, 81 females, data collected in 2013-2020) participated in a fast periodic visual stimulation…

This paper investigates whether typical stress patterns in English nouns and verbs are available as a prosodic cue for categorisation and accelerated word learning during first language acquisition. The stress typicality hypothesis states that left-stressed nouns and right-stressed verbs should be acquired earlier than the reverse configurations…

An important issue regarding developmental changes in cue weighting is whether children weight the dynamic cue of vowel formant transitions relatively more than do adults, whereas adults depend more on the static cue of the fricative noise level. We investigated this issue in Brazilian Portuguese. Additionally, we inserted the segment to be…

How do people learn categories and what changes with development? The current study attempts to address these questions by focusing on the role of attention in the development of categorization. In Experiment 1, participants (adults, 7-year-olds, and 4-year-olds) were trained with novel categories consisting of deterministic and probabilistic…

This study explores the role of a particular social cue--the "sequence" of demonstrated actions and events--in preschooler's categorization. A demonstrator sorted objects that varied on both a surface feature (color) and a nonobvious property (sound made when shaken). Children saw a sequence of actions in which the nonobvious property…

The main goal of this study was to examine whether different types of verbal labeling can influence age-related changes in the dynamic control of behavior by inducing either a proactive or reactive mode of control. Proactive control is characterized by a strong engagement in maintaining task-relevant information to be optimally prepared while…

In any learning situation, children must decide the level of generality with which to encode information. Cues to generality may affect children's memory for different components of a learning episode. In this research, we investigated whether 1 cue to generality, generic language, affects children's memory for information about social categories…

Three alternative mechanisms for age-related decline in memory search have been proposed, which result from either reduced processing speed (global slowing hypothesis), overpersistence on categories (cluster-switching hypothesis), or the inability to maintain focus on local cues related to a decline in working memory (cue-maintenance hypothesis).…

We often need to infer unknown properties of objects from observable ones, just like detectives must infer guilt from observable clues and behavior. But how do inferential processes change with age? We examined young and older adults' reliance on rule-based and similarity-based processes in an inference task that can be considered either a…

Under what conditions will people generalize and remember observed social information? Preschool- (n = 44) and young school-age (n = 46) children and adults (n = 40) heard short vignettes describing characters' actions and motives on a single occasion. Characters were introduced using either proper names or category labels. Test questions asked…

Speakers must command different linguistic registers to index various social-discourse elements, including the identity of the addressee. Previous work found that English-learning children could link registers to appropriate addressees by 5 years. Two experiments found that better cues to the linguistic form or to the social meaning of register…

The Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) task requires children to switch from sorting cards based on shape or color to sorting based on the other dimension. Typically, 3-year-olds perseverate, whereas 4-year-olds flexibly sort by different dimensions. Zelazo and colleagues (1996, Cognitive Development, 11, 37-63) asked children questions about the…

Auditory processing problems in persons with dyslexia are still subject to debate, and one central issue concerns the specific nature of the deficit. In particular, it is questioned whether the deficit is specific to speech and/or specific to temporal processing. To resolve this issue, a categorical perception identification task was administered…

The ability to infer the referential intentions of speakers is a crucial part of learning a language. Previous research has uncovered various contextual and social cues that children may use to do this. Here we provide the first evidence that children also use speech disfluencies to infer speaker intention. Disfluencies (e.g. filled pauses "uh"…

The authors investigated the ability of 9- to 11-year-olds and of adults to use similarity-based and rule-based processes as a function of task characteristics in a task that can be considered either a categorization task or a multiple-cue judgment task, depending on the nature of the criterion (binary vs. continuous). Both children and adults…