Both adults and young children possess powerful statistical computation capabilities--they can infer the referent of a word from highly ambiguous contexts involving many words and many referents by aggregating cross-situational statistical information across contexts. This ability has been explained by models of hypothesis testing and by models of…

A longstanding and fundamental debate in developmental science is whether knowledge is acquired through domain-specific or domain-general mechanisms. To date, there exists no tool to determine whether experimental data support one theoretical approach or the other. In this article, we argue that the U- and N-shaped curves found in a number of…

A practitioner's model of the processes of learning and knowing was developed through a review of global, societal, individual, and personal perspectives on learning. The first phase of the model's development consisted of using a method of exploration based on determining who, what, where, when, why, and how to investigate the following 10…