One of the most common types of interaction between parents and their very young children is picture-book reading, with alphabet books being one of the most popular types of book used in these interactions. Here we report two studies examining alphabet letter learning by 30- to 36-month-old children in book-reading interactions with an adult. Each…

Picture book reading is a very common form of interaction between parents and very young children. Here we explore to what extent young children transfer novel information between picture books and the real world. We report that 15- and 18-month-olds can extend newly learned labels both from pictures to objects and from objects to pictures.…

Cumulative experience with a variety of symbolic artifacts has been hypothesized as a source of young children's increasing sensitivity to new symbol-referent relations. Evidence for this hypothesis comes from transfer studies showing that experience with a relatively easy symbolic retrieval task improves performance on a more difficult task.…

Prior research (DeLoache, Uttal & Rosengren, 2004) has documented that 18- to 30-month-olds occasionally make scale errors: they attempt to fit their bodies into or onto miniature objects (e.g. a chair) that are far too small for them. The current study explores whether scale errors are limited to actions that directly involve the child's…