How do children learn about the structure of the social world? We tested whether children would extract patterns from an agent's social choices to make inferences about multiple groups' relative social standing. In Experiment 1, 4- to 6-year-old children (N = 36; tested in Central New York) saw an agent and three groups ("Group-A,"…

Does knowledge of other people's minds grow from concrete experience to abstract concepts? Cognitive scientists have hypothesized that infants' first-person experience, acting on their own goals, leads them to understand others' actions and goals. Indeed, classic developmental research suggests that before infants reach for objects, they do not…

Even once children can accurately remember their experiences, they nevertheless struggle to use those memories in flexible new ways--as in when drawing inferences. However, it remains an open question as to whether the developmental differences observed during both memory formation and inference itself represent a fundamental limitation on…

Understanding symbols requires going beyond what they literally "are," and figuring out what they're intended to communicate. For example, a drawing of a bird (or the word "bird") could refer to a particular bird, a species, etc… The interpreter must decide between these intended meanings. We ask how children go beyond the…

How do children infer the meaning of a novel verb? One prominent proposal is that children rely on syntactic information in the linguistic context, a phenomenon known as "syntactic bootstrapping". For example, given the sentence "The bunny is gorping the duck," a child could use knowledge of English syntactic roles to infer…

Do mono- and bilingual children differ in the way they learn novel words in ambiguous settings? Listeners may resolve referential ambiguity by assuming that novel words refer to unknown, rather than known, objects--a response known as the "mutual exclusivity effect." Past research suggested that mono- and bilinguals differ with regard to…

Children can acquire novel word meanings by using pragmatic cues. However, previous literature has frequently focused on in-the-moment word-to-meaning mappings, not delayed retention of novel vocabulary. Here, we examine how children use pragmatics as they learn and retain novel words. Thirty-three younger children (mean age: 5.0, range: 4.0-6.0,…

Young children often endorse stereotypes--such as "girls are bad at math." We explore one mechanism through which these beliefs may be transmitted: via pragmatic inference. Specifically, we ask whether preschoolers and adults can learn about an unmentioned social group from what is said about another group, and if this inferential…

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) regularly use the bare form of verbs (e.g., dance) instead of inflected forms (e.g., danced). We propose an account of this behavior in which processing difficulties of children with DLD disproportionally affect processing novel inflected verbs in their input. Limited experience with inflection…

Causal reasoning is a fundamental cognitive ability that enables individuals to learn about the complex interactions in the world around them. However, the mechanisms that underpin causal reasoning are not well understood. For example, it remains unresolved whether children's causal inferences are best explained by Bayesian inference or…

How do people learn about things that they have never perceived or inferred--like molecules, miracles or Marie-Antoinette? For many thinkers, trust is the answer. Humans rely on communicated information, sometimes even when it contradicts blatantly their firsthand experience. We investigate the early ontogeny of this trust using a non-verbal…

Infants are able to use the contexts in which familiar words appear to guide their inferences about the syntactic category of novel words (e.g. 'This is a' + 'dax' -> dax = object). The current study examined whether 18-month-old infants can rapidly adapt these expectations by tracking the distribution of syntactic structures in their input. In…

Human communication relies on the ability to take into account the speaker's mental state to infer the intended meaning of an utterance in context. For example, a sentence such as 'Some of the animals are safe to pet' can be interpreted as giving rise to the inference 'Some and not all animals are safe to pet' when uttered by an expert. The same…

Socially savvy individuals track what they know and what other people likely know, and they use this information to navigate the social world. We examine whether children expect people to have shared knowledge based on their social relationships (e.g., expecting friends to know each other's secrets, expecting members of the same cultural group to…

When we watch movies, we consider the characters' mental states in order to understand and predict the narrative. Recent work in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) uses movie-viewing paradigms to measure functional responses in brain regions recruited for such mental state reasoning (the theory of mind ["ToM"] network). Here,…