In recent years, the theoretical lens of new materialism(s) and surge in feminist thinking has opened up new ways of understanding the complexities of motherhood, babyhood and early childhood. This surge in post-qualitative and feminist inquiry towards the troubling of dominant early childhood abstractions and norms, as well as resistance to…

Previous research has suggested that infants exhibit a preference for familiar over unfamiliar social groups (e.g., preferring individuals from their own language group over individuals from a foreign language group). However, because past studies often employ forced-choice procedures, it is not clear whether infants' intergroup preferences are…

Everyone agrees that infants possess general mechanisms for learning about the world, but the existence and operation of more specialized mechanisms is controversial. One mechanism--rule learning--has been proposed as potentially specific to speech, based on findings that 7-month-olds can learn abstract repetition rules from spoken syllables (e.g.…

There is extensive disagreement as to whether preverbal infants have conceptual categories for different emotions (e.g., anger vs. disgust). In addition, few studies have examined whether infants have conceptual categories of emotions "within" the same dimension of valence and arousal (e.g., high arousal, negative emotions). The current…

Before infants can learn words, they must identify those words in continuous speech. Yet, the speech signal lacks obvious boundary markers, which poses a potential problem for language acquisition (Swingley, "Philos Trans R Soc Lond. Series B, Biol Sci" 364(1536), 3617-3632, 2009). By the middle of the first year, infants seem to have…

Infants' ability to perform visual short-term memory (VSTM) tasks develops rapidly between 6 and 8 months. Here we tested the hypothesis that infants' VSTM performance is influenced by their ability to individuate simultaneously presented objects. We used a "one-shot change detection task" to ask whether 6-month-old infants (N = 47)…

Previous research shows that word segmentation is a language-specific skill. Here, we tested segmentation of bi-syllabic words in two languages (French; English) within the same infants in a single test session. In Experiment 1, monolingual 8-month-olds (French; English) segmented bi-syllabic words in their native language, but not in an…

We tested German nine-month-olds' reliance on pitch and metrical stress for segmentation. In a headturn-preference paradigm, infants were familiarized with trisyllabic words (weak-strong-weak (WSW) stress pattern) in sentence-contexts. The words were presented in one of three naturally occurring intonation conditions: one in which high pitch was…

We routinely observe others' choices and use them to guide our own. Whose choices influence us more, and why? Prior work has focused on the effect of perceived similarity between two individuals (self and others), such as the degree of overlap in past choices or explicitly recognizable group affiliations. In the real world, however, any dyadic…

Infants' representations of physical events are surprisingly flexible. Brief exposure to one event can immediately enhance infants' representations of another event. The present experiments tested two potential mechanisms underlying this priming: enhanced encoding or improved retrieval. Five-month-olds saw a target block become hidden inside a…

The ability to compute non-adjacent regularities is key in the acquisition of a new language. In the domain of phonology/phonotactics, sensitivity to non-adjacent regularities between consonants has been found to appear between 7 and 10 months. The present study focuses on the emergence of a posterior-anterior (PA) bias, a regularity involving two…

Correct counting respects the stable order principle whereby the count terms are recited in a fixed order every time. The 4 experiments reported here tested whether precounting infants recognize and prefer correct stable-ordered counting. The authors introduced a novel preference paradigm in which infants could freely press two buttons to activate…

Many English-speaking children use plural nominal forms in spontaneous speech before the age of two, and display some understanding of plural inflection in production tasks. However, results from an intermodal preferential study suggested a lack of "comprehension" of nominal plural morphology at 24 months of age (Kouider, Halberda, Wood,…

Looking times (LTs) are frequently measured in empirical research on infant cognition. We analyzed the statistical distribution of LTs across participants to develop recommendations for their treatment in infancy research. Our analyses focused on a common within-subject experimental design, in which longer looking to novel or unexpected stimuli is…

Extracting general rules from specific examples is important, as we must face the same challenge displayed in various formats. Previous studies have found that bimodal presentation of grammar-like rules (e.g. ABA) enhanced 5-month-olds' capacity to acquire a rule that infants failed to learn when the rule was presented with visual presentation of…