In word learning, learners need to identify the referent of words by leveraging the fact that the same word may co-occur with different sets of objects. This raises the question, what do children remember from "in the moment" that they can use for cross-situational learning? Furthermore, do children represent pictures of familiar animals…

The implicit learning account of syntactic priming proposes that the same mechanism underlies syntactic priming and language development, providing a link between a child and adult language processing. The present experiment tested predictions of this account by comparing the persistence of syntactic priming effects in children and adults.…

Purpose: Recent findings in preschool children indicated novel adjective recall was enhanced when learned using repeated retrieval with contextual reinstatement (RRCR) compared to repeated study (RS). Recall was similar for learned pictures used during training and new (generalized) pictures with the same adjective features. The current study…

Purpose: Recent behavioral studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of implementing retrieval practice into learning tasks for children. Such approaches have revealed that repeated spaced retrieval (RSR) is particularly effective in promoting children's learning of word form and meaning information. This study further examines how retrieval…

Although children may productively use concrete nouns after limited exposure, complete mastery of adult-like patterns of noun usage can take up to 14 years. We evaluated whether a transition from universal to language-specific naming is part of the refinement in later lexical development, and we compared how this refinement plays out in…

This article focuses on the acquisition of mood in early complement clauses of European Portuguese (EP). Two semantic features are involved in the EP mood system--epistemicity and veridicality. An elicited production task administered to 80 children aged 4 to 9 showed that, even though children use the subjunctive in [-- epistemic] contexts, the…

These studies examined the role of ontological beliefs about category boundaries in early categorization. Study 1 found that preschool-age children (N = 48, aged 3-4 years old) have domain-specific beliefs about the meaning of category boundaries; children judged the boundaries of natural kind categories (animal species, human gender) as discrete…

This study tests the hypothesis that labeling facilitates recall in nursery school children if and only if it leads to rehearsal. Subjects were 34 children ranging in age from 47 to 53 months. During pretraining, those children in the Label group named pictures of animals and fruits as they were presented, while those in the No Label group matched…

Fifty-four 5-year-old Head Start children participated in a study of the effect of varied versus repeated training on the development of the ability to categorize and transfer learning. The children were grouped according to chronological age and results of a mastery test and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. Work categories translated into…

The process by which 55 preschool children acquire the meanings of dimensional and expressive terms was investigated in relation to Eve Clark's semantic feature hypothesis. (Author/MP)

Recent research has shown that certain stimuli are better remembered 6 months after initial exposure than after one week. An alternative explanation of these findings was tested. The explanation posited that the younger children "remember" as well at one week as 6 months later, but at the earlier testing many do not realize what aspect…

Eighty nursery school children were randomly divided into four groups of 20 and given a serial short-term memory task in which difficult-to-label stimuli were used. Three experimental groups were provided with labels for the stimuli. Of these, one group overtly pronounced the labels and rehearsed them during the task, one group merely pronounced…

A series of experiments, all concerned with the topic of mathematical concept learning by the young child, were conducted. The concept mainly focused upon was that of inequalities. Five experiments were run. These are: (1) acquisition of mathematical concepts under experimental situation and in traditional pedagogical situation, (2) cued vs.…

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the learning of the concept "more than" by preschool children. In the first experiment, 48 nursery school children, ages 4 1/2 to 5 1/2 years, were divided into three groups. All were required to say which of two pictures contained the greater number of objects. In group one, circles were used as the…

In order to investigate the effect of reinforcement on learning, 21 disadvantaged black children, 4 to 5 years of age, were divided among three treatment groups. Group I children received only feedback (information) as to the correctness or incorrectness of their responses. Group II children received a raisin for each correct response, and group…