Investigated four cases of English-speaking children with Williams Syndrome (WS), a neuro-developmental disorder characterized by an unusual fractionation of language abilities. Found that, despite low IQ, subjects performance on syntactic tasks and on regular inflection is not impaired, suggesting a distinction between a computation system and an…

Two experiments investigated the role of subsyllabic components (groups of letters forming a single phoneme) for visual recognition of words in a perceptual identification task. Found that identification times were longer for words with fewer phonemes that for words with more phonemes. Findings suggest that subsyllabic components play a crucial…

Four studies used visual habituation to determine whether infants 5, 6, and 9 months old would attend to those aspects of action related to the actor's goals. Found that infants distinguish in their reasoning about human action and object motion. Findings suggest that by 6 months, infants encode actions of persons consistent with more developed…

Examined data for two Danish children to determine subject omission, verb usage, and sentence subjects. Found that children exhibit asymmetry in subject omission according to verb type as subjects are omitted from main verb utterances more frequently than from copula utterances. Concluded that treatment of child subject omission should involve…

Examined 225 Chinese young adults from only-child families and those with siblings to determine relationship between childhood memory and self-description. Found that, compared to subjects with siblings, only-children subjects had more private and fewer self-descriptions, earlier first memories, more specific and more self-focused memories. (LBT)

Five experiments examined 15- and 18-month olds' sensitivity to morphosyntactic dependencies. Results indicated that 18-month olds, but not 15-month olds, were sensitive to basic relationship between "is" and "-ing" and that 18-month-olds could track relationships between functor morphemes. Findings were consistent with hypothesis that 18-month…

Two experiments related structure of a task to underlying cognitive mechanisms. Found that 3-year olds were no better at predicting behavior from partially true beliefs than from entirely false beliefs. Three- and 4-year olds, and autistic children had distinct performance profiles across tasks. Concluded that conceptual foundations for a "theory…

Examined preschoolers' inductive inferences across biological and non-biological kinds. Found support for gradual-enrichment model of conceptual change. Four-year-olds had a limited, coherent, independent biological theory which may form the basis of mature understanding of biological kinds. Explored results in terms of multiple explanatory…

This study investigated the relationship of 3-year olds' reliance on desire when predicting behavior and their performance on false-belief tasks. Results suggested that young children may use the desires of the agent, rather than their own desires, to predict behavior in standard false-belief paradigms. Older preschoolers also have difficulty…

Demonstrates that connectionist models described in "Rethinking Innateness" (Elman, et al., 1996) depend on innately assumed representations and do not offer a genuine alternative to nativism. Presents simulation results showing that the models are incapable of deriving genuine abstract representations that are not presupposed. Maintains that…

Two studies examined the hypothesis that children rely on name representations, often indexed by shape, in their semantic representations. Results suggest that, although shape plays an important role in children's early naming, other factors are also important, including the mental state of the picture's creator (whether intentional or not).…

Three studies examined adults' generic noun phrases in English and Mandarin Chinese from child-directed speech of caregivers interacting with their toddlers. Found that generic noun phrases were reliably identified in both languages. Generic noun phrases most frequently referred to animals. Non-generic noun phrases were used most frequently for…

Demonstrates that an understanding of children's language-acquisition difficulties with a wide range of syntactic constructions should be derived from limitations on the child's ability to deal with processing load and formal representational complexity. Maintains this can be done only in the context of a view of syntactic representation…

Explored early-developing predictions of object motion through 6-month-old infants' head tracking and reaching for moving objects. Found evidence for infants' extrapolation of object motion on linear paths, in accord with principle of inertia. This tendency was remarkably resistant to counter-evidence, observed even after repeated presentations of…

In two experiments, 4- to 6-year-olds made judgments about the knowledge of a protagonist who had only partial information about an object they had full knowledge of. Found surprising discrepancy in performance in the two tasks, which appear superficially to require handling of same properties of the representational mind, indicating that current…