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…

This study compared the temporal measurements of stop consonants in 29 three- to six-year-old Mandarin-speaking children and 12 Mandarin-speaking adults. Each participant produced 18 Mandarin disyllabic words which contained six stop consonants /p, p?, t, t?, k, k?/ each followed by three vowels /a, i, u/ at the word-initial position in the first…

Few studies have investigated associations of milestone development in early childhood with intelligence in adulthood in typically developing children. The current study is an extension of 2 previous studies on smaller samples and investigated associations of age at attainment of 32 developmental milestones attained between 0 and 3 years of age…

A talking face provides redundant cues on the mouth that might support language learning and highly salient social cues in the eyes. What drives children's looking toward the mouth versus eyes of a talking face? This study reports data from 292 children who viewed faces speaking English, French, and Russian. We investigated the impact of…

Word learning depends critically on the use of linguistic context to constrain the likely meanings of words. However, the mechanisms by which children infer word meaning from linguistic context are still poorly understood. In this study, we asked whether adults (n = 58) and 2- to 6-year-old children (n = 180) use discourse coherence relations…

Children's instrumental helping has sometimes been interpreted as a desire to complete action sequences or to restore the physical order of things. Two-year-old children (n = 51) selectively retrieved for an adult the object he needed rather than one he did not (but which equally served to restore the previous order of things), and those with…

When science is integrated into early childhood learning experiences, it becomes a critical area supporting young children's development. Young children are natural scientists, curious about their world, and they engage in scientific practices to learn about and explore their world. This article describes how the K-12 Framework for Science…

Young children use pedagogical cues as a signal that others' actions are social or cultural conventions. Here we show that children selectively "transmit" (enact in a new social situation) causal functions demonstrated pedagogically, even when they have learned and can produce alternative functions as well. Two-year-olds saw two novel…

The authors systematically reviewed peer-reviewed studies done with LENA (Language ENvironment Analysis) technology, guided by three research questions: (a) What types of studies have been conducted, and with which populations, since the launch of LENA technology?; (b) What challenges related to use of LENA technology were identified?; and (c)…

Although virtually all Inuit children in eastern Arctic Canada learn Inuktitut as their native language, there is a critical lack of tools to assess their level of language ability. This article investigates how mean length of utterance (MLU), a widely-used assessment measure in English and other languages, can be best applied in Inuktitut. The…

The study investigated the influence of universal and language-specific morpho-syntactic properties (i.e., flexible word order, case) on the acquisition of verb argument structures in German compared with English. To this end, 65 three- to nine-year-old German learning children and adults were asked to act out grammatical ("The sheep…

Although much research has examined the development of orienting to social directional cues (e.g., eye gaze), little is known about the development of orienting to nonsocial directional cues, such as arrows. Arrow cues have been used in numerous studies as a means to study attentional orienting, but the development of children's understanding of…

Prior research has found that toddlers will form enduring artifact categories after direct exposure to an adult using a novel tool. Four studies explored whether 2- (N = 48) and 3-year-olds (N = 32) demonstrate this same capacity when learning by eavesdropping. After surreptitiously observing an adult use 1 of 2 artifacts to operate a bell via a…

Learning in the earliest stage of life--the infancy, toddlerhood and preschool period--is relational and rapid. Child-initiated and adult-mediated conversations, playful interactions and learning through active involvement are integral to young children making sense of their environments and to their development over time. The child's experience…

In a number of studies, the acquisition of restrictive relative clauses (RCs) shows contrasting findings regarding comprehension and production, with the former usually delayed up to the age of five. As previously claimed in the literature, we suggest that this delay is a task artifact and we present a new procedure for the assessment of…