In word learning, learners need to identify the referent of words by leveraging the fact that the same word may co-occur with different sets of objects. This raises the question, what do children remember from "in the moment" that they can use for cross-situational learning? Furthermore, do children represent pictures of familiar animals…

Episodic memory involves binding together what-where-when associations. In three experiments, we tested the development of memory for such contextual associations in a naturalistic setting. Children searched for toys in two rooms with two different experimenters; each room contained two identical sets of four containers, but arranged differently.…

Does the language we speak affect the way we think, and if so, how? Previous researchers have considered this question by exploring the cognitive abilities of speakers of different languages. In the present study, we looked for evidence of linguistic relativity within a language and within participants by looking at memory recall for monolingual…

Children must acquire multiple language dimensions to ultimately achieve adult levels of language competence. Two such language dimensions, finiteness marking and the verb lexicon, are considered areas of weakness in specific language impairment (SLI). Given these weaknesses, the question arises of whether these two dimensions are related in…

According to the dual criterion account of early linguistic judgment (Merriman & Lipko, 2008), preschool-aged children who possess more efficient object memory processes should also be more accurate judges of whether various objects have known names. In support of this claim, both the accuracy of object recognition and the speed of object…

Preschool-age children were hypothesized to use one of two criteria, cue recognition or target generation, to make several linguistic judgments. When deciding whether a word is one they know, for example, some were expected to consider whether they recognized its sound form (cue recognition), whereas others were expected to consider whether a…