We present an exact replication of Experiment 2 from Kovács and Mehler's 2009 study, which showed that 7-month-old infants who are raised bilingually exhibit a cognitive advantage. In the experiment, a sound cue, following an AAB or ABB pattern, predicted the appearance of a visual stimulus on the screen. The stimulus appeared on one side of the…

Autistic children (AC) show less audiovisual speech integration in the McGurk task, which correlates with their reduced mouth-looking time. The present study examined whether AC's less audiovisual speech integration in the McGurk task could be increased by increasing their mouth-looking time. We recruited 4- to 8-year-old AC and nonautistic…

If cues from different sensory modalities share the same cause, their information can be integrated to improve perceptual precision. While it is well established that adults exploit sensory redundancy by integrating cues in a Bayes optimal fashion, whether children under 8 years of age combine sensory information in a similar fashion is still…

Working memory (WM) improves dramatically during childhood but what drives this improvement is not well understood. One influential account thus far has proposed a simple increase in storage capacity. However, recent findings have shown that multiple factors, such as differences in the ability to use attention to enhance the maintenance of…

These studies investigate the influence of adults' explicit attention to commonalities of appearance on children's preference for individuals resembling themselves. Three findings emerged: (1) An adult's identification of two dolls' respective similarity to and difference from the child led 3-year-olds to prefer the similar doll (study 1, n = 32).…

Dyslexia has frequently been related to atypical auditory temporal processing and speech perception. Results of studies emphasizing speech onset cues and reinforcing the temporal structure of the speech envelope, that is, envelope enhancement (EE), demonstrated reduced speech perception deficits in individuals with dyslexia. The use of this…

Learning about actions requires children to identify the boundaries of an action and its units. Whereas some action units are easily identified, parents can support children's action learning by adjusting the presentation and using social signals. However, currently, little is understood regarding how children use these signals to learn actions.…

Word learning in young children requires coordinated attention between language input and the referent object. Current accounts of word learning are based on spoken language, where the association between language and objects occurs through simultaneous and multimodal perception. In contrast, deaf children acquiring American Sign Language (ASL)…

How do people learn about things that they have never perceived or inferred--like molecules, miracles or Marie-Antoinette? For many thinkers, trust is the answer. Humans rely on communicated information, sometimes even when it contradicts blatantly their firsthand experience. We investigate the early ontogeny of this trust using a non-verbal…

Previous evidence suggests that children's mastery of prosodic modulations to signal the informational status of discourse referents emerges quite late in development. In the present study, we investigate the children's use of head gestures as it compares to prosodic cues to signal a referent as being contrastive relative to a set of possible…

When seeking to explain social regularities (such as gender differences in the labor market) people often rely on internal features of the targets, frequently neglecting structural and systemic factors external to the targets. For example, people might think women leave the job market after childbirth because they are less competent or are better…

Young children spend a lot of time at home, yet there is little empirical research on how they spend that time and how it relates to developmental outcomes. Prior research suggests less-structured time--where children practice making choices and setting goals--may develop "self-directed" executive function in 6-year-olds. But…

Children engage cognitive control reactively when they encounter conflicts; however, they can also resolve conflicts proactively. Recent studies have begun to clarify the mechanisms that support the use of proactive control in children; nonetheless, sufficient knowledge has not been accumulated regarding these mechanisms. Using behavioral and…

In conversation, individual utterances are almost always ambiguous, with this ambiguity resolved by context and discourse history ("common ground"). One important cue for disambiguation is the topic under discussion with a particular partner (e.g., "want to pick?" means something different in a conversation with a bluegrass…

Infants are sensitive to syllable co-occurrence probabilities when segmenting words from fluent speech. However, segmenting two languages overlapping at the syllabic level is challenging because the statistical cues across the languages are incongruent. Successful segmentation, thus, relies on infants' ability to separate language inputs and track…