Details BootLex, a model using distributional cues to build a lexicon and achieving significant segmentation results with English, Japanese, and Spanish; child- and adult-directed speech, and written text; and variations in coding structure. Compares BootLex with three groups of computational models of the infant segmentation process. Discusses…

Habituated 2-, 5-, and 8-month-olds to visual stimuli following statistically predictable pattern, then showed the familiar pattern alternating with novel sequence of identical stimuli. Found significantly greater interest in novel sequence at all ages. Results support likelihood of domain general statistical learning in infancy and imply that…

Compared gestures of Chinese and American deaf children who had not been exposed to a usable conventional language model with speech of hearing children learning Mandarin or English. Found that deaf children conveyed central elements of motion events in their communications. Deaf American and Chinese children used gestures to express motion in…

Examined in four studies whether and when infants connect information about an actor's affect and perception to their action. Found that 12-month-olds, but not 8-month-olds, recognized that an actor was likely to grasp the object she had visually regarded with positive affect. Replicated findings with 12- and 14-month-olds and with several…

This study examined whether 9.5-month-olds could use featural information to individuate objects. Results suggest that infants categorize events involving opaque and transparent occluders as the same kind of situation and that infants are more likely to give evidence of individuation when they need to reason about one kind of event than when they…

Two experiments probed 8-month-olds' ability to represent different kinds of entities: rigid, cohesive objects; flexible, cohesive objects; and non-rigid, non-cohesive portions of sand. Results suggest that the processes by which infants individuate and track entities are sensitive to material kind, rigid cohesive objects occupy a privileged…

Four experiments investigated whether 9-month-olds could use the presence of labels to help them establish a representation of two distinct objects in a complex object individuation task. Found that the presence of two distinct labels facilitated object individuation, but presence of one label for both objects, two distinct tones, two distinct…

Two studies investigated development of infants' visual preferences for the human body shape. Results indicated that 18-month-olds had a reliable preference for scrambled body shapes over typical body shapes in line drawings, while 12- and 15-month-olds did not respond differentially. In condition using photographs, only 18-month-olds had reliable…

Three experiments explored the conditions under which inductive inferences about people were made by children and adults. Results indicated that children often predicted that people would behave differently in the future than they did in the past. Younger children limited predictions of consistency to non-psychological events. Older children…

Three experiments introduced 2- and 3-year-olds to novel adjectives either using full noun phrases and describing multiple familiar objects sharing a salient property or describing nouns of vague reference. Found that both groups mapped novel adjectives onto object properties when given taxonomically specific nouns with rich referential and…

Five experiments used a categorization habituation-of-looking paradigm to investigate infants' categorization of animals and vehicles based on static versus dynamic attributes of stimuli (color images versus dynamic point-light displays). Findings showed that 6-month-olds categorize animals and vehicles based on static and dynamic information, and…

Two experiments examined development of the ordinality concept in infants. Found that 11-month-olds successfully discriminated, whereas 9-month-olds failed to discriminate sequences that descended in numerical value from sequences increasing in numerical value. Nine-month-olds could discriminate the ordinal direction of sequences that varied in…

Tested whether 7-month-olds' means-end behaviors were genuine or the repetition of trained behaviors under conditions of greater arousal. Found that infants' learned button-pushing to light a set of distant lights differed from button-pushing to retrieve toys. Infants demonstrated means-end skills with behaviors that they had not been trained to…

Examined the nature of numerical knowledge in 5-month-olds to inform the debate whether numerical abilities result from capacities dedicated to numerical cognition or to more general perceptual capacities. Found that 5-month-olds could determine the number of collective entities, moving groups of items, when non-numerical perceptual factors such…

Two experiments documented that conceptual knowledge influences 3-year-olds' extension of novel words. When objects were described as having conceptual properties typical of artifacts, children extended novel labels on the basis of shape. When same objects were described as having conceptual properties typical of animate kinds, children extended…