Prediction error plays a pivotal role in theories of learning, including theories of language acquisition and use. Researchers have investigated whether and under which conditions children, like adults, use prediction to facilitate language comprehension at different levels of linguistic representation. However, many aspects of the reciprocal…

This dissertation investigates the neural bases and development of displacement, which is a language property that allows us to communicate about situations outside the "here-and-now." One way to displace from our immediate environment is to project ourselves into the here-and-now point of an alternative actuality. Another form of…

The account that word learning starts in earnest during the second year of life, when infants have mastered the disambiguation skills, has recently been challenged by evidence that infants during the first year already know many common words. The preliminary ability to rapidly map and disambiguate linguistic labels was tested in Italian-speaking…

Language is the basis of human communication and is the most important key to complete mental development and thinking. Therefore, children must learn to communicate using appropriate language. For this to happen, the development of language in the child must be understood as a biological process, complete with internal laws and with marked stages…

The current study investigated whether age-related changes in the conceptualization of social groups influences interpretation of the pronoun we. Sixty-four 2- and 4-year-olds (N = 29 female, 50 White-identifying) viewed scenarios in which it was ambiguous how many puppets performed an activity together. When asked who performed the activity, a…

The power and precision with which humans link language to cognition is unique to our species. By 3-4 months of age, infants have already established this link: simply listening to human language facilitates infants' success in fundamental cognitive processes. Initially, this link to cognition is also engaged by a broader set of acoustic stimuli,…

This paper invites us to reconsider our usual understanding of infancy, no longer as something that passes but as "infantia." The Latin word "infantia," which is not easy to translate, means a lack of speech, a lack of eloquence, and also infancy, babyhood, and dumbness. Drawing on Barbara Cassin's works on the untranslatables,…

Children's understanding of passives of certain mental state predicates appears to lag behind passives of so-called actional predicates, an asymmetry that has posed a major empirical challenge for theories of passive acquisition. This paper argues against the dominant view in the literature that treats the predicate-based asymmetry as…

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…

It is known that the rhythms of speech are visible on the face, accurately mirroring changes in the vocal tract. These low-frequency visual temporal movements are tightly correlated with speech output, and both visual speech (e.g., mouth motion) and the acoustic speech amplitude envelope entrain neural oscillations. Low-frequency visual temporal…

It has been well-documented that although children around 4 years start to attribute false beliefs to others in classic false-belief tasks, they are still less able to evaluate the truth-value of propositional belief-reporting sentences, especially when belief conflicts with reality. This article investigates whether linguistic cues, verb…

A surprising comprehension-production asymmetry in subject-verb (SV) agreement acquisition has been suggested in the literature, and recent research indicates that task-specific as well as language-specific features may contribute to this apparent asymmetry across languages. The present study investigates when during development children acquiring…

A key factor that affects whether and at what age children can demonstrate an understanding of false belief and complement-clause constructions is the type of task used (whether it is implicit/indirect or explicit/direct). In the current study, we investigate, in an implicit/indirect way, whether children understand that a story character's belief…

This study investigates the influence of semantic maturation on early lexical development by examining the impact of contextual diversity--known to influence semantic development--on word promotion from receptive to productive vocabularies (i.e., comprehension-expression gap). Study 1 compares the vocabularies of 3685 American-English-speaking…

Cultural experiences can influence how people attend to different emotional cues. Whereas semantic content explicitly describes feelings, vocal tone conveys implicit information regarding emotions. This cross-cultural study examined children's attention to emotional cues in spoken words. The sample consisted of 121 European American (EA) and 120…