The ability to make inferences about what one's peers know is critical for social interaction and communication. Three experiments (n = 309) examined the curse of knowledge, the tendency to be biased by one's knowledge when reasoning about others' knowledge, in children's estimates of their peers' knowledge. Four- to 7-year-olds were taught the…

This study tested the prediction that, with age, children should rely less on familiarity and more on expertise in their selective social learning. Experiment 1 (N = 50) found that 5- to 6-year-olds copied the technique their mother used to extract a prize from a novel puzzle box, in preference to both a stranger and an established expert. This…

Fundamental to amassing a lexicon of relational terms (i.e., verbs, prepositions) is the ability to abstract and categorize spatial relations such as a figure (e.g., "boy") moving along a path (e.g., "around" the barn). Three studies examine how infants learn to categorize path over changes in "manner," or how an action is performed (e.g., running…

Event-related potential (ERP) correlates of item and source memory were assessed in 18 children (7-8 years), 20 adolescents (13-14 years), and 20 adults (20-29 years) performing a continuous recognition memory task with object and nonobject stimuli. Memory performance increased with age and was particularly low for source memory in children. The…

The present work examined the discovery of linguistic cues during a word segmentation task. Whereas previous studies have focused on sensitivity to individual cues, this study addresses how individual cues may be used to discover additional, correlated cues. Twenty-four 9-month-old infants were familiarized with a speech stream in which…