Prelinguistic cognitive reference comprehension is foundational to language acquisition and higher cognitive functions. However, its ontogenetic origins in the first year of life are currently not well understood. The current study pitted cognitivist against social interactionist views. We worked with infants monthly from 10 to 13 months of age…

To learn a language infants must learn to link arbitrary sounds to their meaning. While words are the clearest example of this link, they are not the only component of language; morphological regularities (e.g., the plural -s suffix in English) carry meaning as well. Comprehensive theories of language acquisition must account for how infants build…

The development of numerical concepts is described from infancy to preschool age. Infants a few days old exhibit an early sensitivity for numerosities. In the course of development, nonverbal mental models allow for the exact representation of small quantities as well as changes in these quantities. Subitising, as the accurate recognition of small…

The relation between the maturation of brain mechanisms responsible for the N400 elicitation in the event-related brain potential (ERP) and the development of behavioral language skills was investigated in 12-month-old infants. ERPs to words presented in a picture-word priming paradigm were analyzed according to the infants' production and…

Recent studies suggest that even infants attend to others' beliefs in order to make sense of their behavior. To warrant the assumption of early belief understanding, corresponding competences need to be demonstrated in a variety of different belief-inducing situations. The present study provides corresponding evidence, using a completely nonverbal…

We investigated whether infants comprehend others' nonverbal communicative intentions directed to a third person, in an "overhearing" context. An experimenter addressed an assistant and indicated a hidden toy's location by either gazing ostensively or pointing to the location for her. In a matched control condition, the experimenter performed…

Infants of 14 months of age demonstrated significantly improved understanding of containment as a result of a training intervention in which they played with cans and tubes in their homes for a month. After training, their test scores were similar to those of untrained 20-month-old children. (RH)

What capabilities are required for an organism to evince an "explicit" understanding of gaze as a mentalistic phenomenon? One possibility is that mentalistic interpretations of gaze, like concepts of unseen, supernatural beings, are culturally-specific concepts, acquired through cultural learning. These abstract concepts may either require a…

This study attempted to determine: (1) whether lower-order units (agent or agent-action) within the agent-action-recipient relationship exist in any functional way in the 1-word infant's comprehension of speech; and (2) whether the use of repetition and/or reduced length (common modifications in adult-to-infant speech) used to focus on these…

Analysis of natural language data from children up to six years of age revealed that by the third year, children clearly distinguished between reality and a variety of nonreal contrasts in their everyday speech. An experimental study in which children were questioned about the reality and appearance of a variety of items confirmed findings of the…

In three experiments, a multiple habituation paradigm was used to examine the ability of 7- and 9-month-old prelinguistic infants to form a natural, basic-level object category. Findings constitute independent evidence for the existence of a linguistically relevant nonlinguistic category prior to the onset of word comprehension. (SED)

Investigates numerical competence in five-month-old infants using a violation-of-expectation paradigm. Supports previous findings that young children possess not only the competence for limited numerical abstraction, but also the ability to carry out addition and subtraction operations. An alternative explanation, that infants' responses are based…

Examines the development of infants' ability to begin recognizing novel referents of common object names. In particular, the present experiment investigated the development of 12- to 20-month-old infants' ability to infer that an unfamiliar but categorically related object can be designated by a newly learned name for the object class. (Author/RH)

A cross-sectional study of language comprehension in relation to cognitive functioning in 48 10-to 21-month-old children, four at each month of age, revealed significant correlations between comprehension and five sensorimotor subscales. (Author/PHR)

A series of experiments investigated 5- to 17-month-olds' comprehension of adults' direction of gaze and manual pointing behaviors. Findings indicated that a change in the adult's direction of gaze and orientation of head does not seem sufficient to enable the infant to reliably localize a referent when the infant must choose between pairs of…