Numerous learning studies have shown that if the period of time devoted to studying information (e.g., casa-house) includes at least 1 test (casa-?), performance on a final test is improved--a finding known as the "testing effect". In most of these studies, however, the final test is identical to the initial test. If the final test requires a…

Used head-mounted eye-tracking system to study kindergartners' and adults' moment-by-moment language processing ability as they responded to spoken instructions. Found that 5-year-olds did not take into account relevant discourse/pragmatic principles when resolving temporary syntactic ambiguities and showed little/no ability to revise initial…

Three experiments examined 3- to 6-year olds' ability to use a speaker's utterance based on false belief to identify which of several referents was intended. Found that many 4- to 5-year olds performed correctly only when it was unnecessary to consider the speaker's belief. When the speaker gave an ambiguous utterance, many 3- to 6-year olds…

Examines connectionist simulations indicating that starting with simplified inputs or limited memory is not necessary in training recurrent neural networks to learn pseudo-natural languages; such restrictions hinder acquisition. Suggests that Gold's theorem and possible lack of explicit negative evidence do not implicate innate,…

Three experiments used a visual fixation technique to examine whether toddlers interpret speech continuously. Found that 24-month-olds had delayed responses when a competing distractor picture's label overlapped phonetically with the target at onset, but not when the pictures' labels rhymed, showing that children monitored speech stream…

Measured nonword reading, exception word reading, and performance with Ternus apparent movement displays (the perception of which is believed to depend upon the magnocellular and parvocellular pathways) in dyslexic children and children without reading difficulties. Found that Ternus task performance was related to nonword reading ability but not…

This study compared role of motion in adults' and infants' perception of object unity. Findings favored ecologically-oriented accounts of object perception. Motion was a determinant of object unity for infants. Alignment and common motion contributed to adults' object-unity perception; synchronous color changes did not. Infants detected…

Compared online processing of Catalan phonemic contrasts in Spanish-dominant and Catalan-dominant Catalan-Spanish bilingual undergraduate students. Results supported hypothesis that L1 (first language) shapes the perceptual system at early stages of development in such a way that it will determine the perception of nonnative phonemic contrasts,…

Four experiments examined the perceptual features used by 4.5- to 11.5-month olds to individuate objects involved in occlusion events. Results indicated that 4.5-month olds used shape and size features to individuate objects in occlusion events. By 7.5 months, infants used pattern, and by 11.5 months, they used color to reason about object…

Tested whether 2- to 4-year olds could reason with incongruent syllogisms when encouraged to use their imagination. Randomly assigned 2-, 3-, and 4-year olds to one of four conditions (no cue, word cue, fantasy planet, or imagery) and presented syllogistic reasoning problems with incongruent information. Found that in imagination conditions, 2-…

Presented neonates with lexical and grammatical words prepared from natural maternal speech. Found that neonates could categorically discriminate the sets based on a constellation of perceptual cues that distinguished them. Suggested that this ability to discriminate words on basis of multiple acoustic/phonological cues provides a perceptual base…

Three habituation experiments examined the necessary conditions under which infants invoked the principle of rational action, interpreting behavior as goal-directed action. Found that the rational action principle operated at 9 months but not at 6 months. Perceptual cues indicating agency were not necessary prerequisites for a goal-directed…

Two experiments examined toddlers' noun vocabularies and interpretations of names for solid and non-solid items. Results indicated that one side of the solidity-syntax-category organization mapping was favored. Seventeen- to 33-month olds do not systematically generalize names for solid things by shape similarity until they already know many…

Two experiments used Headed Records memory model to examine preschoolers' performance on a variation of Perner's Smarties task, a false-beliefs test. Data indicated that when the computational demands imposed by the original task are reduced, young children can and do remember what they had thought about the contents of a tube even after its true…

Two experiments examine whether "lemma" (pronouns in German) access automatically entails activation of the corresponding word form or whether a word form is activated only when the noun is produced, but not when replaced by pronouns. Results suggest that when a pronoun is produced, both the lemma and the phonological form of the replaced noun…