Humans can attribute beliefs to others. However, it is unknown to what extent this ability results from an innate biological endowment or from experience accrued through child development, particularly exposure to language describing others' mental states. We test the viability of the language exposure hypothesis by assessing whether models…

Perception verbs and mental verbs have significant overlap in their syntax and semantics; both reference mental representations when taking embedded clauses, as in "I see that Maria was here" and "I think that Maria was here." Some have suggested that perception is more accessible for young children than mental states, raising…

Linguistic alignment--the contingent reuse of our interlocutors' language at all levels of linguistic structure--pervades human dialogue. Here, we design unique measures to capture the degree of linguistic alignment between interlocutors' linguistic representations at three levels of structure: lexical, syntactic, and semantic. We track these…

This dissertation focuses on when and how children learn about the meanings of the propositional attitude" verbs know" and "think". "Know" and "think" both express belief. But they differ in their veridicality: "think" is non-veridical and can report a false belief; but "know" can only…

An empirical study is presented that tests a novel prediction generated by the Metaphor-by-Pattern-Completion (MPC) connectionist model of metaphor comprehension (Thomas & Mareschal, 2001). The MPC model predicts a developmental progression in the way that children process metaphors, from a preference for basic-level metaphors to a preference for…