Adult word recognition is influenced by prior exposure to phonologically or semantically related words ("cup" primes "cat" or "plate") compared to unrelated words ("door"), suggesting that words are organised in the adult lexicon based on their phonological and semantic properties and that word recognition implicates not just the heard word, but…

Examined event-based memory in three groups of children between ages 14 and 25 months. Found that search task success was general in oldest group while performance was similar on a task in which success "may" have been due to recalling an object-removal event and one in which success could "only" have been due to recall of…

Examined the degree of specificity encoded in early lexical representations by presenting 18- to 23-month-olds with object labels either correctly or incorrectly pronounced and analyzing children's eye movement. Found that children recognized the spoken words in both conditions but recognition was poorer when words were mispronounced, with effects…

Three studies examined adults' generic noun phrases in English and Mandarin Chinese from child-directed speech of caregivers interacting with their toddlers. Found that generic noun phrases were reliably identified in both languages. Generic noun phrases most frequently referred to animals. Non-generic noun phrases were used most frequently for…

Tested whether 2- to 4-year olds could reason with incongruent syllogisms when encouraged to use their imagination. Randomly assigned 2-, 3-, and 4-year olds to one of four conditions (no cue, word cue, fantasy planet, or imagery) and presented syllogistic reasoning problems with incongruent information. Found that in imagination conditions, 2-…

Two experiments examined differences in the early noun learning of English- and Japanese-speaking children. Found that English-speaking children's vocabularies were heavily lopsided with many more object than animal names, whereas Japanese-speaking children's vocabularies were more evenly balanced. Results suggested that early learners of English…