Infants are able to use the contexts in which familiar words appear to guide their inferences about the syntactic category of novel words (e.g. 'This is a' + 'dax' -> dax = object). The current study examined whether 18-month-old infants can rapidly adapt these expectations by tracking the distribution of syntactic structures in their input. In…

In gender-marking languages, the gender of the noun determines the form of the preceding article. In this study, we examined whether French-learning toddlers use gender-marking information on determiners to recognize words. In a split-screen preferential looking experiment, 25-month-olds were presented with picture pairs that referred to nouns…

A fundamental question in developmental science is how brains with and without language compute numbers. Measuring young children's verbal reactions in France (Paris) and in England (Oxford), here we show that, although there is a general arithmetic ability for small numbers that is shared by monkeys and preverbal infants, the development of such…