Early Verb Learning: How Do Children Learn How to Compare Events?

An important problem verb learners must solve is how to extend verbs. Children could use cross-situational information to guide their extensions; however, comparing events is difficult. In 2 studies, researchers tested whether children benefit from initially seeing a pair of similar events (“progressive alignment”) while learning new verbs and whether this influence changes with age. In Study 1, 2.5- and 3.5-year-old children participated in an interactive task. Children who saw a pair of similar events and then varied events were able to extend verbs at test and differed from a control group; children who saw 2 pairs of varied events did not differ from the control group. In Study 2, events were presented on a monitor. Following the initial pair of events that varied by condition, a Tobii x120 eye tracker recorded 2.5-, 3.5-, and 4.5-year-olds’ fixations to specific elements of events (areas of interest) during the 2nd pair of events, which were the same across conditions. After seeing the pair of events that were highly similar, 2.5-year-olds showed significantly longer fixation durations to agents and to affected objects as compared with the all-varied condition. At test, 3.5-year-olds were able to extend the verb, but only in the progressive alignment condition. These results are important because they show children’s visual attention to relevant elements in dynamic events is influenced by their prior comparison experience, and they show that young children benefit from seeing similar events as they learn to compare events to each other.     

Costs and benefits of strategy construction in a speeded discrimination task

The costs and benefits of constructing and utilizing a strategy for performing a speeded discrimination task were assessed in terms of time and mental resources. The strategy involved using information about the position a word occupied in order to respond to its identity more rapidly. The resources used to construct and utilize the strategy were assessed from responses to probes presented at various times during the task. In Experiment 1, the probe required a manual response, whereas in Experiment 2, the probe required a vocal response. Strategy construction interfered with the probe task in Experiment 1 but not in Experiment 2, suggesting that strategy construction required resources specific to the manual response system. There was also some evidence that strategy construction required general resources, but the evidence for specific resources was much stronger. The findings are consistent with our previous ideas about how the strategy is represented (Logan, 1980a; Logan & Zbrodoff, 1979). The different results with different responses to the probes point out important limitations on previous studies of probe interference and of cost-benefit analysis, which each focused on a single dimension of cost and benefit. The differences suggest that a multiple-resources approach to probe interference and cost-benefit analysis might be more appropriate.     

Effects of time of day and information importance on adults' memory for a short story

An experiment is reported that tested subjects' memory for information in a short story, either immediately after hearing the story or after a delay of one week. The story was presented, and the subjects tested, either in the morning or in the afternoon. The results showed that, although there was no overall effect of time of day of presentation on recall, relatively more important information from the story was recalled after a delay following presentation in the late afternoon, and more unimportant information following original presentation in the morning. The time of day of the delayed recall test did not have any effect on performance.     

Children's syllogistic reasoning

Most theories of the development of deductive ability propose that children acquire formal rules of inference. An alternative theory assumes that reasoning consists of constructing a mental model of the situation described in the premises, scanning the model for an informative conclusion, and then searching for alternative models that refute this conclusion. Hence, performance should reflect two principal factors: the difficulty of constructing a model, which depends on the “figure” of the premises, and the number of models that have to be evaluated to respond correctly. In Experiment 1, two groups of children (9- to 10- and 11- to 12-year-olds) drew conclusions from 20 pairs of syllogistic premises. The results confirmed that children are affected both by figure and by number of models. Experiment 2 corroborated these findings for all 64 possible forms of syllogistic premises. The development of reasoning ability may therefore depend on the acquisition, not of formal rules of logic, but of procedures for manipulating models.