The present study tested the hypothesis that verbal labels support category induction by providing compact hypotheses. Ninety-seven 4- to 6-year-old children (M = 63.2 months; 46 female, 51 male; 77% White, 8% more than one race, 4% Asian, and 3% Black; tested 2018) and 90 adults (M = 20.1 years; 70 female, 20 male) in the Midwestern United States…

The present study examines two self-regulation traits, grit and curiosity, in predicting creative achievement in an adult sample (N = 522). Grit has been related to achievement in various domains, and although prior empirical work failed to find associations with everyday creative activities in adolescent and young adult samples, theoretically it…

English-speaking children and adults generate "orthographic skeletons" (i.e., preliminary orthographic representations) solely from aural exposure to novel words. The present study examined whether skilled readers generate orthographic skeletons for all novel words they learn or do so only when the words have a unique possible spelling.…

A food's visual features and testimony from others are important clues for children when making food choices. Children must integrate these two forms of information to make choices about food. The present study investigated children's food choices when these two clues are presented together. After confirming that children between the ages of…

Our ability to perceive our own and other people's bodies is critical to the success of social interactions. Research has shown that adults have a distorted perception of their own body and those of other adults. However, these studies ask perceivers to estimate for adults with a similar bodily make-up. This study explored the developmental…

Although statistical learning (SL) has been studied extensively in developmental dyslexia (DD), less attention has been paid to other fundamental challenges in language acquisition, such as cross-situational word learning. Such investigation is important for determining whether and how SL processes are affected in DD at the word level. In this…

Upon hearing a novel label, listeners tend to assume that it refers to a novel, rather than a familiar object. While this disambiguation or mutual exclusivity (ME) effect has been robustly shown across development, it is unclear what it involves. Do listeners use their pragmatic and lexical knowledge to exclude the familiar object and thus select…

The reduced efficacy of voluntary imitation in autism is suggested to be underpinned by differences in sensorimotor processing. We examined whether the imitation of novel atypical biological kinematics by autistic adults is enhanced by imitating a model in a predictable blocked practice trial order. This practice structure is expected to…

In direct interactions with others, 9-month-old infants' learning about objects is facilitated when the interaction partner addresses the infant through eye contact before looking toward an object. In this study we investigated whether similar factors promote infants' observational learning from third-party interactions. In Experiment 1,…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of listening condition, age, and years of performing experience on the melodic error detection process and accuracy of adult amateur musicians. Participants (N = 33) engaged in a series of six short melodies, where each participant played three melodies and listened to three melodies. The…

Purpose: This study examined toddlers' processing of mispronunciations based on their frequency of occurrence in child speech and the speaker who produced them. Method: One hundred twenty 22-month-olds were assigned to 1 of 4 conditions. Using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm, toddlers were shown visual displays containing 1 familiar…

Theories of learning and attention predict a positive relationship between reading times on unfamiliar words and their learning; however, empirical findings of contextual learning studies range from a strong positive relationship to no relationship. To test the conjecture that longer reading times may reflect different cognitive and metacognitive…

Prior linguistic knowledge is proposed to support the acquisition and consolidation of new words. Adults typically have larger vocabularies to support word learning than children, but the developing brain shows enhanced neural processes that are associated with offline memory consolidation. This study investigated contributions of prior knowledge…

Prior research has demonstrated beneficial outcomes for learning new skills in older adulthood, including increased cognitive and functional abilities, which help prevent age-related declines and foster healthy aging. However, these studies largely have included participants not typically considered at risk for cognitive and functional decline…

This study tested whether individual sensitivity to an auditory perceptual cue called amplitude rise time (ART) facilitates novel word learning. Forty adult native speakers of Polish performed a perceptual task testing their sensitivity to ART, learned associations between nonwords and pictures of common objects, and were subsequently tested on…