In spoken languages, children acquire locative terms in a cross-linguistically stable order. Terms similar in meaning to in and on emerge earlier than those similar to "front" and "behind," followed by "left" and "right." This order has been attributed to the complexity of the relations expressed by…

One of the most prominent issues in early cognitive and linguistic development concerns how children figure out meanings of words from hearing them in context, since in many contexts there are multiple words and multiple potential referents for those words. Recent findings concerning on-line sentence comprehension suggest that, within the…

A longitudinal study examined the role of a mapping system in 2-year olds' learning of color and size words. Results indicated that the children acquired color maps in a characteristic order and showed a different acquisition pattern for size words. Results suggest that learning word associations may promote color-word acquisition; learning color…

Examined factors associated with individual variation in false belief understanding in three- to five-year olds. Found that family size was strongly associated with false belief understanding in children who were less competent linguistically, suggesting that the presence of siblings can compensate for slower language development in developing…

This paper analyzes Piagetian theory on the relative development of cognition and language, the local homology model which claims there are specific language-cognition relationships at specific points in time, normal development and local homology, and development in language-impaired children. Implications for clinical decision making are…