Experience-dependent change pervades early human development. Though trajectories of developmental change have been well charted in many domains, the episode-to-episode schedules of experiences on which they are hypothesized to depend have not. Here, we took up this issue in a domain known to be governed in part by early experiences: music. Using…

Early number skills represent critical milestones in children's cognitive development and are shaped over years of interacting with quantities and numerals in various contexts. Several connectionist computational models have attempted to emulate how certain number concepts may be learned, represented, and processed in the brain. However, these…

What makes a word easy to learn? Early-learned words are frequent and tend to name concrete referents. But words typically do not occur in isolation. Some words are predictable from their contexts; others are less so. Here, we investigate whether predictability relates to when children start producing different words (age of acquisition; AoA). We…

The standard view on Theory of Mind (ToM) is that the mastery of the false belief (FB) task around age 4 marks the ontogenetic emergence of full-fledged meta-representational ToM. Recently, a puzzling finding has emerged: Once children master the FB task, they begin to fail true belief (TB) control tasks. This finding threatens the validity of FB…

Humans can attribute beliefs to others. However, it is unknown to what extent this ability results from an innate biological endowment or from experience accrued through child development, particularly exposure to language describing others' mental states. We test the viability of the language exposure hypothesis by assessing whether models…

Neural network models have recently made striking progress in natural language processing, but they are typically trained on orders of magnitude more language input than children receive. What can these neural networks, which are primarily distributional learners, learn from a naturalistic subset of a single child's experience? We examine this…

Abstract How do people gather samples of evidence to learn about the world? Adults often prefer to sample evidence from diverse sources--for example, choosing to test a robin and a turkey to find out if something is true of birds in general. Children below age 9, however, often do not consider sample diversity, instead treating non-diverse samples…

A key factor that affects whether and at what age children can demonstrate an understanding of false belief and complement-clause constructions is the type of task used (whether it is implicit/indirect or explicit/direct). In the current study, we investigate, in an implicit/indirect way, whether children understand that a story character's belief…

The current studies (N = 255, children ages 4-5 and adults) explore patterns of age-related continuity and change in conceptual representations of social role categories (e.g., "scientist"). In Study 1, young children's judgments of category membership were shaped by both category labels and category-normative traits, and the two were…

Children and adults use established global knowledge to generate real-time linguistic predictions, but less is known about how listeners generate predictions in circumstances that semantically conflict with long-standing event knowledge. We explore these issues in adults and 5- to 10-year-old children using an eye-tracked sentence comprehension…

In typical development, word learning goes from slow and laborious to fast and seemingly effortless. Typically developing 2-year-olds seem to intuit the whole range of things in a category from hearing a single instance named--they have word-learning biases. This is not the case for children with relatively small vocabularies ("late…

Humans are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment via statistical learning (SL), an ability thought to play an important role in language learning and learning more generally. While much work has examined statistical learning in infants and adults, less work has looked at the developmental trajectory of SL during childhood…

We examined whether children's ability to integrate speech and gesture follows the pattern of a broader developmental shift between 3- and 5-year-old children (Ramscar & Gitcho, 2007) regarding the ability to process two pieces of information simultaneously. In Experiment 1, 3-year-olds, 5-year-olds, and adults were presented with either an…

Certain social context features (e.g., maternal presence) are known to increase young children's exploration, a key process by which they learn. Yet limited research investigates the role of social context, especially peer presence, in exploration across development. We investigate whether the effect of peer presence on exploration is mediated by…

There are clear associations between the overall quantity of input children are exposed to and their vocabulary acquisition. However, by uncovering specific features of the input that matter, we can better understand the mechanisms involved in vocabulary learning. We examine whether exposure to "wh"-questions, a challenging quality of…