The goal of the current study was to statistically evaluate the reliable scalability of a set of tasks designed to assess Theory of Mind (ToM) without language as a confounding variable. This tool might be useful to study ToM in populations where language is impaired or to study links between language and ToM. Low verbal versions of the ToM tasks…

The present study explored the temporal allocation of attention in groups of 8-year-old children, 10-year-old children, and adults performing a rapid serial visual presentation task. In a dual-condition task, participants had to detect a briefly presented target (T2) after identifying an initial target (T1) embedded in a random series of…

Research Findings: In 2 experiments, we tested whether children generalize psychological and biological properties to novel foods. We used an induction task in which a property (either biological or psychological) was associated with a target food. Children were then asked whether a taxonomically related and a script-related food would also have…

Most earlier studies investigating the evolution of the Stroop effect with the amount of reading practice have reported data consistent with an inverted U-shaped curve, whereby the Stroop effect appears early during reading acquisition, reaches a peak after 2 or 3 years of practice, and then continuously decreases until adulthood. The downward…

This study investigates how derivational complexity interacts with first language (L1) properties, second language (L2) input, age of first exposure to the target language, and length of exposure in child L2 acquisition. We compared elicited production of "wh"-questions in French in two groups of 15 participants each, one with L1 English…

We explored the relationship between working memory (WM) and visually controlled attention (CA) in young bilingual and monolingual children. Previous research has shown that balanced bilingual children outperform monolinguals in CA. However, it is unclear whether this advantage is truly associated with bilingualism or whether potential WM and/or…

Much developmental work has been devoted to "scalar implicatures." These are implicitly communicated propositions linked to relatively weak terms (consider how "Some" pragmatically implies "Not all") that are more likely to be carried out by adults than by children. Children tend to retain the linguistically encoded…

Configural visual abilities in thirteen children with Williams syndrome (WS) compared to 13 children matched on mental age and 13 children matched on chronological age. Configural abilities were tested through four tasks (1) Silhouette (2) Fragmented (3) Mooney and (4) overlapping figures. In the first three tasks, it was necessary to take into…

The relationships between response latencies and accuracy on the matching familiar figures test (MFFT) and two gross motor tasks (batting or catching a ball) were studied in twenty-nine 9-year-old boys. Children were classified into four groups using a double dichotomy of response latencies and errors on the MFFT: reflective, impulsive,…