Researchers commonly use puppets in development science. Amongst other things, puppets are employed to reduce social hierarchies between child participants and adult experimenters akin to peer interactions. However, it remains controversial whether children treat puppets like real-world social partners in these settings. This study investigated…

There is little research regarding autistic adult, parent and professional perspectives on support goals for young autistic children. A total of 87 autistic adults, 159 parents of autistic children, and 80 clinical professionals living in New Zealand and Australia completed a survey about the appropriateness and importance of common support goals…

Young children's (n = 108) and adults' (n = 40) ability to compute ad-hoc quantity conversational implicatures was assessed using a new implicit task that relied on eye-tracking. The children were 2 and 5 years old. Looking times reveal that all participants interpreted simple references by relying on implicatures. However, 2-year-olds failed to…

In pursuing goals, people seek favorable odds. We investigated whether young children use this fact to infer goals from people's actions across two experiments on Canadian 3- to 7-year-old children (N = 316; 167 girls, 149 boys). Participants' demographic information was not formally collected, but the region is predominantly middle-class and…

Using an intersectional analysis, this article critically analyses implied and expressed norms to identify perceptions of appropriate behaviour in children's play, and to explore how social communicative arenas such as Internet forums construct knowledge and values. Adults' responses to an incident that occurred amongst a group of children in…

This paper provides a discourse analysis of 12 Swedish sexuality education texts intended for preschool practitioners and published between 1969 and 2021. Using Fairclough's framework, we identify three discourses about children's sexual play in relation to children's sexual agency in the texts: child sexuality as encouraged and entangled with…

In the Iranian culture, do children prefer to trust same-gender adults for learning new information? A sample of 106 three and half- to seven-year-old preschool children participated in two tasks. The testimony task was designed to set the prior accuracy of informants against their gender. To establish prior accuracy, children watched a man and…

Only a very few studies to date have comprehensively assessed children's knowledge of sexuality. In this study, we examined the level of sexual knowledge among children aged 3-6 years in Finland. We analysed children's explanations of what they saw in drawings related to genital naming, conception and childbirth, safety skills, and adult sexual…

Tests of measurement invariance are essential to determining whether individual scores or group averages are comparable across populations. While international comparisons of mean IQ scores are common, tests of measurement invariance for intelligence test batteries (necessary for comparisons to be empirically supported) are rare. In this study,…

Trajectories of cognitive and neural development suggest that, despite early emergence, the ability to extract environmental patterns changes across childhood. Here, 5- to 9-year-olds and adults (N = 211, 110 females, in a large Canadian city) completed a memory test assessing what they remembered after watching a stream of shape triplets: the…

Recursive NPs are difficult to produce and late to emerge. We compare prosodic and syntactic abilities in Japanese-speaking five- and six-year-olds (n = 28) and adults (n = 10). It is reported that syntactic structure in Japanese is prosodically marked via downstep and metrical boost. Results of an elicited imitation task suggested that children…

This paper addresses how input variability in the adult phonological system is mastered in the output of young children in Akan, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana, involving variability between labio-palatalized consonants and front rounded vowels. The high-frequency variant involves a complex consonant which is expected to be mastered late, while…

It has long been noted that verb phrase (VP) ellipsis cancels the polarity sensitivity of the English Positive Polarity Items (PPIs). In recent work, it has been proposed that words for disjunction are governed by a parameter. On one value of the parameter, disjunction is a PPI for adult speakers of many languages including Mandarin Chinese. On…

Recent research has shown that from early in development, children selectively form new beliefs in response to information supplied by others. However, little is known about the development of selective revision of existing beliefs in response to socially conveyed information. Such selective social belief revision has been extensively studied by…

Children's differing learning trajectories cross-linguistically have been at the forefront of gender acquisition research, often with conflicting results and conclusions. As a result, the source of children's different learning behaviors in gender acquisition has been unclear. I argue that children's gender acquisition is driven by the search for…