Acquiring Non-Object Terms: The Case for Time Words

We address the issue of children's understanding of abstract words with two studies on preschoolers' knowledge of the time-duration words minutes, hours, days, and years. The first study examines 4- and 5-year-olds' ability to answer questions about durations of common phenomena with duration terms. The second study examines 4- to 6-year-olds' comprehension of duration terms with a forced-choice pointing task. Both show that preschoolers' knowledge of such words is incomplete, but that it adheres to the pattern proposed in previous work with toddlers for abstract words. More specifically, children form lexical domains for such words even before they know their individual meanings, thereby allowing the children to often respond appropriately but not usually correctly to questions about abstract dimensions like time.     

Preschoolers' understanding of germs as invisible mechanisms

Recent studies have presented conflicting claims regarding whether young children's reasoning about biological content involves a unique set of causal mechanisms and theoretical entities. Three studies examined preschoolers' understanding of nonobservable causal mechanisms in causes of illness. According to traditional accounts, these children know that certain behaviors lead to illness but have no idea why or how. Many of the behaviors children cite as causes are actually mediated by the action of germs (e.g., contamination and contagion). Do children recognize that germs (nonobvious, invisible particles) are the mechanisms involved in some cases of illness causation? Study 1 demonstrates that 4- and 5-year-olds' predictions of who will get sick in cases of contamination and contagion are based on the presence or absence of germs. Study 2 serves as a control and further tests how children generalize this mechanism: Which causes do children think are mediated by germs? Data suggest that preschoolers understand but undergeneralize the role of germs. A final study indicates that younger preschoolers (3-year-olds) recognize that appearances may be deceiving when it comes to judging causes of illness. This understanding would seem to be a precursor to beliefs about specific mechanisms. Results are discussed in terms of commonsense theories and early conceptions of biology.     

Trick or treat: Children's understanding of surprise

This study examines the hypothesis that an understanding of false belief would lead to a radical change in young children's understanding of surprise. In Experiment 1, children aged 3 to 8 years were asked to assess the knowledge state of another person and to then choose an object that would surprise that person. The results showed that whereas the 3-year-olds' choice of surprising object varied with the object, the 5-year-olds' choice of object varied with their assessment of the other's knowledge state. Hence, understanding surprise depends on an understanding of false belief. In Experiment 2, the number of questions was reduced and children were required to match a schematized facial expression to the object judged to be surprising. Again, older children, unlike their younger counterparts, pointed out that surprised faces are made when another's expectations are violated. Once children begin to ascribe belief states to others they begin to understand that surprise depends upon the unexpected. The results help resolve the differences in the findings of Wellman and Banerjee (1991) and Hadwin and Perner (1991) on children's understanding of surprise. In natural judgements, young children employ a principle of desirability; older children employ principles of belief violation.     

A construction based analysis of child directed speech

The child directed speech of twelve English‐speaking motherswas analyzed in terms of utterance‐level constructions. First, the mothers' utterances were categorized in terms of general constructional categories such as Wh‐questions, copulas and transitives. Second, mothers' utterances within these categories were further specified in terms of the initial words that framed the utterance, item‐based phrases such as Are you …, I'll …, It's …, Let's …, What did … The findings were: (i) overall, only about 15% of all maternal utterances had SVO form (most were questions, imperatives, copulas, and fragments); (ii) 51% of all maternal utterances began with one of 52 item‐based phrases, mostly consisting of two words or morphemes (45% began with one of just 17 words); and (iii) children used many of these same item‐based phrases, in some cases at a rate that correlated highly with their own mother's frequency of use. We suggest that analyses of adult–child linguistic interaction should take into account not just general constructional categories, but also the item‐based constructions that adults and children use and the frequency with which they use them.     

OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING DURING SHARED BOOK READING: THE EFFECTS ON PRESCHOOLERS' ATTENTION TO PRINT AND LETTER KNOWLEDGE

This study investigated the effects of observational learning on preschoolers' use of a questioning technique, attention to print, and knowledge of the alphabet. Preschoolers who observed a model ask questions asked more questions during a shared book episode than did children who did not observe a model ask questions. Children who observed a model ask questions about the letters made more letter-related comments than did children who did not observe a model ask questions about the letters. However, children who made print-related comments did not learn more letters than children who did not make print-related comments.     

Preschoolers' understanding of stable and changeable characteristics

Most adults can easily distinguish between stable characteristics, which affect personal identity, and changeable ones, which are free to vary within an individual. The purpose of this study was to investigate preschoolers' developing knowledge of stable (identity, gender, and race), changeable (mood, weight, and health), and changeable-but-irreversible (age and height) characteristics using pictorial and question tasks. In the first two experiments, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children and adults were asked to judge whether two pictures could represent the same person. Children in these experiments understood stable properties more clearly than changeable or irreversible ones. Children who made mistakes tended to treat changes in variable characteristics as if they altered personal identity. In Experiment 3, subjects answered questions about the stability or variability of the same characteristics. Children tested with questions in Experiment 3 showed a better understanding of stable and variable characteristics than did children tested with pictures in Experiments 1 and 2. Most of the children who erred in Experiment 3 understood stable attributes but treated changeable ones as if they were constant; however, a minority of children understood changeable properties but treated stable ones as if they were variable. These findings provide new information about how children understand and misunderstand the status of personal attributes.     

Learning words and rules: abstract knowledge of word order in early sentence comprehension

Children quickly acquire basic grammatical facts about their native language. Does this early syntactic knowledge involve knowledge of words or rules? According to lexical accounts of acquisition, abstract syntactic and semantic categories are not primitive to the language-acquisition system; thus, early language comprehension and production are based on verb-specific knowledge. The present experiments challenge this account: We probed the abstractness of young children's knowledge of syntax by testing whether 25- and 21-month-olds extend their knowledge of English word order to new verbs. In four experiments, children used word order appropriately to interpret transitive sentences containing novel verbs. These findings demonstrate that although toddlers have much to learn about their native languages, they represent language experience in terms of an abstract mental vocabulary. These abstract representations allow children to rapidly detect general patterns in their native language, and thus to learn rules as well as words from the start.     

Preschoolers trust novel members of accurate speakers' groups and judge them favourably

By age 3, children track a speaker's record of past accuracy and use it as a cue to current reliability. Two experiments (N?=?95 children) explored whether preschoolers' judgements about, and trust in, the accuracy of a previously reliable informant extend to other members of the informant's group. In Experiment 1, both 3- and 4-year-olds consistently judged an animated character who was associated with a previously accurate speaker more likely to be correct than a character associated with a previously inaccurate speaker, despite possessing no information about these characters' individual records of reliability. They continued to show this preference one week later. Experiment 2 presented 4- and 5-year-olds with a related task using videos of human actors. Both showed preferences for members of previously accurate speakers' groups on a common measure of epistemic trust. This result suggests that by at least age 4, children's trust in speaker testimony spreads to members of a previously accurate speaker's group.     

The effect of causal chain length on counterfactual conditional reasoning

We investigated German and Nichols' finding that 3‐year‐olds could answer counterfactual conditional questions about short causal chains of events, but not long. In four experiments (N =192), we compared 3‐ and 4‐year‐olds' performance on short and long causal chain questions, manipulating whether the child could draw on general knowledge to answer. We failed to replicate German and Nichols' result, finding instead that in two experiments (Experiments 1 and 3) there was no difference in performance on short and long causal chain questions and in two experiments (Experiments 2 and 4) children showed the opposite pattern: short causal chain questions were more difficult than long. These two unexpected patterns of results were replicated in a fifth study (N =97). Children with lower language ability found short causal chains more difficult than long. Performance by children with higher language ability was unaffected by the length of the causal chain they had to consider. We found no evidence that children showed precocious counterfactual thinking when asked about recent events in a causal chain and conclude that counterfactual thinking develops after 4 years of age.     

Children reading spoken words: interactions between vocabulary and orthographic expectancy

There is an established association between children's oral vocabulary and their word reading but its basis is not well understood. Here, we present evidence from eye movements for a novel mechanism underlying this association. Two groups of 18 Grade 4 children received oral vocabulary training on one set of 16 novel words (e.g., ‘nesh’, ‘coib’), but no training on another set. The words were assigned spellings that were either predictable from phonology (e.g., nesh) or unpredictable (e.g., koyb). These were subsequently shown in print, embedded in sentences. Reading times were shorter for orally familiar than unfamiliar items, and for words with predictable than unpredictable spellings but, importantly, there was an interaction between the two: children demonstrated a larger benefit of oral familiarity for predictable than for unpredictable items. These findings indicate that children form initial orthographic expectations about spoken words before first seeing them in print. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/jvpJwpKMM3E .     

The relation between children's conceptual functioning with color and color term acquisition

Young children experience considerable difficulty in learning their first few color terms. One explanation for this difficulty is that initially they lack a conceptual representation of color sufficiently abstract to support word meaning. This hypothesis, that prior to learning color terms children do not represent color as an abstraction, was tested in two experiments using samples of 25- to 39-month-olds and 20- to 32-month-olds. Children's ability to conceptually represent color and their knowledge of color terms were assessed, and a strong association was found between the ability to make inferences based on color and the comprehension of color words. Children who did not comprehend color terms were unsuccessful at a conceptual task that required them to represent color as a property independent of the particular objects that displayed it. The results suggest that the initial absence of an abstract representation of color contributes to the difficulty that young children encounter when first learning color words.     

No frills: Simple regularities in language can go a long way in the development of word knowledge

Recent years have seen a flourishing of Natural Language Processing models that can mimic many aspects of human language fluency. These models harness a simple, decades-old idea: It is possible to learn a lot about word meanings just from exposure to language, because words similar in meaning are used in language in similar ways. The successes of these models raise the intriguing possibility that exposure to word use in language also shapes the word knowledge that children amass during development. However, this possibility is strongly challenged by the fact that models use language input and learning mechanisms that may be unavailable to children. Across three studies, we found that unrealistically complex input and learning mechanisms are unnecessary. Instead, simple regularities of word use in children's language input that they have the capacity to learn can foster knowledge about word meanings. Thus, exposure to language may play a simple but powerful role in children's growing word knowledge. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/dT83dmMffnM .

Research Highlights

• Natural Language Processing (NLP) models can learn that words are similar in meaning from higher-order statistical regularities of word use.
• Unlike NLP models, infants and children may primarily learn only simple co-occurrences between words.
• We show that infants' and children's language input is rich in simple co-occurrence that can support learning similarities in meaning between words.
• We find that simple co-occurrences can explain infants' and children's knowledge that words are similar in meaning.

     

Retrieval of Episodic Information From Memory: Comparisons Among 3- and 4-Year-Olds, 7- and 8-Year-Olds,and Adults

Young children's and adults' recall of episodic information was explored in 4 experiments. The task required participants to recall a target noun presented as the last item of a 4-noun string of related (either categorically or thematically) or unrelated words. Providing all 3 preceding nouns or a subset of them cued recall. Experiment 1 found that 7- and 8-year-old children's recall was better with pictures as opposed to text, and children showed performance equal to adults with thematically related pictorial stimuli. Using pictorial stimuli, Experiment 2 showed that the number of cues present at retrieval affected 7- and 8-year-olds' recall. Experiments 3 and 4 tested recall of episodic information in 3- and 4-year-olds using pictorial stimuli. The results suggested that young children also have access to episodic information in memory and the number of cues present at retrieval influenced recall. The findings are discussed in the context of children's memory for events.     

Preschool Children's Understanding of Conflicting Desires

This study examines the conditions under which 3-year-olds can use the desires of others to predict others' behavior. In Study 1, children were highly successful in predicting the actions of an agent based on that agent's desires when they were explicitly told about the agent's desires, even when the agent's desires were strongly different from the children's own. Study 2 showed that 3-year-olds could also predict the actions of an agent when they had to infer the agent's desires from the previous good and bad experiences of the agent and from information about the agent's general behavioral preferences. Studies 3 and 4 demonstrated that children had difficulty predicting an agent's behavior when they both had to infer the desire of the agent and this desire conflicted with their own desires. These results suggest that preschoolers' desire reasoning is sophisticated but also may be influenced by the processing demands of the task.     

Event report training: An examination of the efficacy of a new intervention to improve children's eyewitness reports

This study tested the efficacy of Event Report Training (ERT), a training procedure designed to improve children's memory reports and decrease suggestibility. Children (N = 58) participated in two forensically relevant play events. Two weeks later, children received ERT or participated in control procedures, after which they received a memory interview. Results indicated that ERT decreased suggestibility to abuse‐related questions in preschoolers; their responses were highly accurate and age differences were eliminated. ERT did not increase the amount of information preschoolers provided in response to open‐ended questions. However, with ERT 7‐ to 8‐year‐olds reported 32% more information which included a 32% increase in actions, without an accompanying increase in incorrect information. Due to school‐aged children's high accuracy rates, it was impossible to gauge the effectiveness of ERT in reducing suggestibility. The failure to obtain an effect of ERT in preschoolers' open‐ended recall is discussed in terms of their cognitive‐developmental limitations. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Temporal information and children's and adults' causal inferences

Three experiments examined whether children and adults would use temporal information as a cue to the causal structure of a three-variable system, and also whether their judgements about the effects of interventions on the system would be affected by the temporal properties of the event sequence. Participants were shown a system in which two events B and C occurred either simultaneously (synchronous condition) or in a temporal sequence (sequential condition) following an initial event A. The causal judgements of adults and 6–7-year-olds differed between the conditions, but this was not the case for 4-year-olds' judgements. However, unlike those of adults, 6–7-year-olds' intervention judgements were not affected by condition, and causal and intervention judgements were not reliably consistent in this age group. The findings support the claim that temporal information provides an important cue to causal structure, at least in older children. However, they raise important issues about the relationship between causal and intervention judgements.     

Children's memory for a personally experienced event: Implications for testimony

This study was prompted by an interest in children's abilities to testify in legal settings. Based on the fundamental premise that children cannot provide accurate testimony about events that cannot be remembered, this investigation focused on 3- and 6-year-olds' memory of a salient, personally experienced event. The event selected was that of a visit to the doctor for a physical examination. Children at both ages remembered most of the features of the check-up at an immediate memory test, although the older children performed somewhat better than younger children. In addition, the performance of the 3-year-olds decreased over delay intervals of 1 and 3 weeks, whereas that of the 6-year-olds remained constant over this period. Moreover, at all assessment points the older children provided more information in response to open-ended general questions than did the younger children. Both groups of children were quite good at giving accurate responses to misleading questions, although the 3-year-olds performed below the level of 6-year-olds. The need for further controlled studies of children's memory capabilities is discussed.     

Looking for Wugs in all the Right Places: Children's Use of Prepositions in Word Learning

To help infer the meanings of novel words, children frequently capitalize on their current linguistic knowledge to constrain the hypothesis space. Children's syntactic knowledge of function words has been shown to be especially useful in helping to infer the meanings of novel words, with most previous research focusing on how children use preceding determiners and pronouns/auxiliary to infer whether a novel word refers to an entity or an action, respectively. In the current visual world experiment, we examined whether 28- to 32-month-olds could exploit their lexical semantic knowledge of an additional class of function words—prepositions—to learn novel nouns. During the experiment, children were tested on their ability to use the prepositions in, on, under, and next to to identify novel creatures displayed on a screen (e.g., The wug is on the table), as well as their ability to later identify the creature without accompanying prepositions (e.g., Look at the wug). Children overall demonstrated understanding of all the prepositions but next to and were able to use their knowledge of prepositions to learn the associations between novel words and their intended referents, as shown by greater-than chance looks to the target referent when no prepositional phrase was provided.