Prelinguistic cognitive reference comprehension is foundational to language acquisition and higher cognitive functions. However, its ontogenetic origins in the first year of life are currently not well understood. The current study pitted cognitivist against social interactionist views. We worked with infants monthly from 10 to 13 months of age…

Eye movements were recorded while sixty-two 1-year-olds, 4-year-olds, and adults watched television. Of interest was the extent to which viewers looked at the same place at the same time as their peers because high similarity across viewers suggests systematic viewing driven by comprehension processes. Similarity of gaze location increased with…

The present article investigates spatial- and social-cognitive processes in toddlers' mapping of concepts to real-world events. In 2 studies we explore how event segmentation might lay the groundwork for extracting actions from the event stream and conceptually mapping novel verbs to these actions. In Study 1, toddlers demonstrated the ability to…

Research Findings: Executive function begins to develop in infancy and involves an array of processes, such as attention, inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, which provide the means by which individuals control their own behavior, work toward goals, and manage complex cognitive processes. Thus, executive function plays a…

Recent studies suggest that even infants attend to others' beliefs in order to make sense of their behavior. To warrant the assumption of early belief understanding, corresponding competences need to be demonstrated in a variety of different belief-inducing situations. The present study provides corresponding evidence, using a completely nonverbal…

Describes a lexical training program developed to teach object, visible movement, and invisible movement words to children at stage 5 (N=7) and stage 6 (N=16) object permanence development. Stage 6 children learned all three types of words equally well, while stage 5 children learned object and visible movement but not invisible movement words.…

Auditory evoked responses (AER) of 14 infants were recorded by means of scalp electrodes positioned over frontal, temporal, and parietal regions of each hemisphere before and after training in which nonsense bisyllables were used to name novel objects. Changes in two portions of AER waveforms were found to occur when a name was correctly paired…

Child development is complicated. Good caring practices, environments, activities, and the expectations of children and teachers are designed to promote and foster each child's development. All children have a job. Their job is to live their lives, learn about the world, and develop into the very best people that they can be. All they need is…

We measured infants' recognition of familiar and unfamiliar 3-D objects and their 2-D representations using event-related potentials (ERPs). Infants differentiated familiar from unfamiliar objects when viewing them in both two and three dimensions. However, differentiation between the familiar and novel objects occurred more quickly when infants…

A series of 4 experiments involving 96 infants aged 6 to 17.5 months examined their capacities to detect repeated target words in fluent speech. Taken together, study results indicate that some ability to detect words in fluent speech contexts is present by 7.5 months of age. (SLD)

This study was designed to determine whether infants could perceive action role reversals when the direction of action is ruled out as a cue; whether infants consider inanimate, nonpotent objects to be unlikely agents; and whether both these discriminations could be reliably reflected in the heart rate response. (Author/SB)

The ability to understand references to the absent enables conversation to move beyond the here-and-now to matters distant in both space and time. Such understanding requires appreciating the relation between language and communicative intent: one must recognize speakers' intentions to use language to converge on a shared conversational focus that…

Two experiments examined the responses of 19-34 month old children to sentences susceptible to more than one interpretation. Results indicate that young children interpret and respond to language in terms of an action-based strategy and that even young children engage in a continuous, context-sensitive process of interpretation. (Author/JAC)

Three methods by which hearing adults process speechread information are discussed: selective adaptation, immediate memory, and repetition priming. Also discussed are mental representations of speech by hearing-impaired and hearing children, infants' responses to speechread stimuli compared to other stimuli, infants' speechreading of a foreign…

Infants' understanding of "toy model-real exemplar" relations was assessed through preferential looking and habituation tasks. Results from the preferential looking task suggest that 18-month toddlers are just beginning to demonstrate comprehension of symbolic relations between iconic models and their real object counterparts. Performance of 10-…