Although there is wide evidence on young children's category learning, questions concerning how cognitive mechanisms and social mediation work collaboratively in this process remain sparse. Here, we study the impact of pedagogy in young children's categorization of novel artifacts. A before-and-after micro-genetic study compared 58 3-year-old…

Infants and toddlers experience the world in interaction with others. Likewise, social interactions are important in learning about math--concepts of number ("one," "two," "three"), space ("on top," "upside-down," "round"), and magnitude ("more," "big,"…

Despite the seemingly simple mapping between adjectives and perceptual properties (e.g., color, texture), preschool children have difficulty establishing the appropriate extension of novel adjectives. When children hear a novel adjective applied to an individual object, they successfully extend the adjective to other members of the same object…

Investigated in 3 studies whether 2- to 4-year-olds make accurate causal inferences on the basis of patterns of variation and covariation. Found that all three age groups considered information from various patterns of variation and covariation in judgments regarding two objects and activation of a machine. Three- and 4-year-olds used the…

A study investigated children's difficulty in learning color words and attempted to determine whether the difficulty was perceptual, conceptual, or linguistic. The subjects were 24 two-year-olds, half with knowledge of color words and half without, and a similar control group. The experimental subjects were given conceptual and comprehension tasks…