Children with delays in expressive language (late talkers) have heterogeneous developmental trajectories. Some are late bloomers who eventually "catch-up," but others have persisting delays or are later diagnosed with developmental language disorder (DLD). Early in development it is unclear which children will belong to which group. We…

Executive function (EF) plays a foundational role in development. A brain-based model of EF development is probed for the experiences that strengthen EF in the dimensional change card sort task in which children sort cards by one rule and then are asked to switch to another. Three-year-olds perseverate on the first rule, failing the task, whereas…

Two experiments demonstrate that 14- to 18-month-old toddlers can adaptively change how they categorize a set of objects within a single session, and that this ability is related to vocabulary size. In both experiments, toddlers were presented with a sequential touching task with objects that could be categorized either according to some…

This paper examines the tie between knowledge and behavior in a noun generalization context. An experiment directly comparing noun generalizations of children at the same point in development in forced-choice and yes/no tasks reveals task-specific differences in the way children's knowledge of nominal categories is brought to bear in a moment. To…

Young children tend to generalize novel names for novel solid objects by similarity in shape, a phenomenon dubbed "the shape bias". We believe that the critical insights needed to explain the shape bias in particular, and cognitive development more generally, come from Dynamic Systems Theory. We present two examples of recent work focusing on the…

Two experiments examined toddlers' noun vocabularies and interpretations of names for solid and non-solid items. Results indicated that one side of the solidity-syntax-category organization mapping was favored. Seventeen- to 33-month olds do not systematically generalize names for solid things by shape similarity until they already know many…

Argues that the operating characteristics of perceiving and remembering provide a foundation for progress on detailing the processes through which knowledge is realized in real-time tasks and in detailing the processes of developmental change. Includes three examples to illustrate how forming developmental hypotheses in terms of perceiving and…