Bilingual infants acquire languages in a variety of language environments. Some caregivers follow a one-person-one-language approach in an attempt to not "confuse" their child. However, the central assumption that infants can keep track of what language a person speaks has not been tested. In two studies, we tested whether bilingual and…

This study explores how 7-month-old infants categorize graphical images varying in basic perceptual features by using a fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) task. Most participants were Caucasian and their parents had a higher education, but the family's socioeconomic background was mixed. Experiment 1 (N = 23) tested brain responses to…

From about 7 months of age onward, infants start to reliably fixate the goal of an observed action, such as a grasp, before the action is complete. The available research has identified a variety of factors that influence such goal-anticipatory gaze shifts, including the experience with the shown action events and familiarity with the observed…

Previous studies found an impact of language familiarity on face recognition in 9- and 12-month-olds. Own race faces are better recognized when associated with native language, whereas for other race faces, it is with non-native language. The aim of this study is to investigate if language familiarity can also influence abstract pattern…

Learning always happens from input that contains multiple structures and multiple sources of variability. Though infants possess learning mechanisms to locate structure in the world, lab-based experiments have rarely probed how infants contend with input that contains many different structures and cues. Two experiments explored infants' use of two…

Accurate perception of emotional (facial) expressions is an essential social skill. It is currently debated whether emotion categorization in infancy emerges in a "broad-to-narrow" pattern and the degree to which language influences this process. We used an habituation paradigm to explore (a) whether 14- and 18-month-old infants perceive…

Babies are miraculous linguistic creatures. From an early age, they seamlessly master the language or languages in their early environment. Babies' early language-learning abilities turn out to not just be about language--they are also social in nature, orienting children to cultural in-group members. Infants and young children demonstrate…

This study establishes a sequence of developing mental state understandings in infants. We used three violation-of-expectation paradigms to assess fifty-seven 16-month-olds' ability to (a) infer an actress's intention from her prior repeated approaches to an object, (b) recognize her emotion by watching her facial-emotional display, and (c) deduce…

Early impaired response to social partners' distress may negatively impact subsequent social development. Identifying factors contributing to successful responding may inform assessment and intervention. This study explores how: (1) social impairment, and (2) partner familiarity relate to response to partners' distress. Infants with and without…

Language provides rich social information about its speakers. For instance, adults and children make inferences about a speaker's social identity, geographic origins, and group membership based on her language and accent. Although infants prefer speakers of familiar languages (Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007), little is known about the…

This research tests whether analogical learning is present before language comprehension. Three-month-old infants were habituated to a series of analogous pairs, instantiating either the "same" relation (e.g., AA, BB, etc.) or the "different" relation (e.g., AB, CD, etc.), and then tested with further exemplars of the…

Infants have been shown to generalize from a small number of input examples. However, existing studies allow two possible means of generalization. One is via a process of noting similarities shared by several examples. Alternatively, generalization may reflect an implicit desire to explain the input. The latter view suggests that generalization…

Infants start learning words, the building blocks of language, at least by 6 months. To do so, they must be able to extract the phonological form of words from running speech. A rich literature has investigated this process, termed word segmentation. We addressed the fundamental question of how infants of different ages segment words from their…

It is surprising that there are inconsistent findings of transitive inference (TI) in young infants given that non-linguistic species succeed on TI tests. To conclusively test for TI in infants, we developed a task within the social domain, with which infants are known to show sophistication. We familiarized 10- to 13-month-olds (M = 11.53 months)…

Do young infants understand that pointing gestures allow the pointer to change the information state of a recipient? We used a third-party experimental scenario to examine whether 9- and 11-month-olds understand that a pointer's pointing gesture can inform a recipient about a target object. When the pointer pointed to a target, infants…