Journal of Cognition and Development最新文献

The role of function in toddlers' object labeling has been debated for decades in developmental science. We aimed to clarify the relation between toddlers' understanding of functions and words using a set of everyday objects that varied in the number of associated functions (e.g., balls can be bounced, thrown, or rolled while toothbrushes primarily brush teeth). Forty 23- to 25-month-old monolingual English-learning toddlers completed a preferential looking paradigm in which objects were used in conventional and unconventional ways, designed to measure expectations about object functional expectations. We also measured toddlers' lexical knowledge about these objects using a looking-while-listening task. Finally, we assessed productive vocabulary size using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences. The results suggest that toddlers have expectations about the functions of some objects, but not others. In particular, these expectations were stronger for objects that are tightly linked with their functions in everyday experiences, and for children who have larger vocabularies. These findings also suggest that toddlers' ability to demonstrate functional knowledge may depend on the specific objects included in the task.

Attending to numerical and spatial magnitude information is important for many math skills (e.g., measurement, proportional reasoning). The flexible attention to magnitudes (FAM) account proposes that preschool-aged children's early ability to disentangle numerical and spatial magnitude information and flexibly shift attention between the two is a significant predictor of early math achievement. We recruited 226 children from diverse racial/ethnic and family income backgrounds in the Midwestern U.S. (51% female; Mage = 55 months; SDage = 8 months) to examine the associations between their FAM skill and math achievement. We first tested the hypothesis that children's FAM skill is specific to their ability to flexibly shift between dimensions of both numerical and spatial magnitude. We did not find evidence that children were using a single-dimension strategy to complete the FAM task. We did find that children's performance depended on which dimension they had previously attended to in prior trial levels, suggesting that the task indeed assesses children's flexibly shifting between different dimensions of magnitudes. Second, we tested the association between FAM skill and math achievement while also taking into account proportional reasoning, number line estimation, subitizing, and non-symbolic numerical magnitude comparison. We found that children's FAM task performance was significantly related to their math achievement after controlling for demographic covariates, executive function (EF) skills, and specific math skills. Implications of these findings for understanding the development of early math skills for diverse preschool-aged children in the U.S. is discussed.

Speed of information processing (SIP) as determined by response to spatial uncertainty is an important, perhaps limiting factor for cognitive development. With adults, although their manual response RTs for spatial uncertainty increase linearly with increasing choices, their saccadic RTs do not. In contrast, 7-month-old infants' saccadic RTs have been shown to increase with more target choices. What is the developmental course that enables this saccadic RT discrepancy between 7-month-oldsand adults? To address this question, the present study assessed adults' and 5- and 9-month-old infants' reactive saccades in a comparable choice reaction time task that varied spatial uncertainty. Both 5- and 9-month-olds' saccadic RTs increased linearly with more choice alternatives and uncertainty. Nine-month-olds' saccadic RTs increased at a shallower rate, however, approaching the slope of adults' saccadic RT function, which did not exhibit an increase with more uncertainty. Thus, there is a developmental trend for assessing spatial SIP with saccadic RTs. As infants age, saccadic responses become less sensitive to spatial uncertainty and approach adult-like performance. Decreasing saccade sensitivity may be due to developmental changes in the influence of response selection or in the functioning of inhibitory mechanisms.

This work investigated whether Mexican-American bilingual children and Mexican monolingual children (ages 4-6; N = 245) use Spanish varieties (Puerto Rican vs. Mexican) when making friendship judgments for themselves (1^st person) and/or for others (3^rd person), and whether children prioritize dialect varieties over race and gender categories. On a dialect discrimination task, both groups of children distinguished between the Spanish varieties. When choosing a friend for themselves (1^st person judgments), both groups of children preferred a character who spoke their own dialect (Mexican Spanish over Puerto Rican Spanish), but only when gender and race were held constant; this preference was stronger for monolingual Mexican children than for bilingual Mexican-American children. In contrast, neither group used dialect cues to guide judgments about others' friendship preferences (3^rd person). For Mexican monolingual children, their friendship judgments (on both 1^st and 3^rd person tasks, when gender and race were held constant) were related to their ability to discriminate between the dialects, but this was not the case for bilinguals. Finally, neither group made use of dialect variety in their social judgments when this factor was pitted against a character's gender or race. Instead, both groups predominantly used gender as a basis for friendship judgments. These results indicate an early sensitivity to linguistic dialect in young children's social judgments, as well as boundary conditions on the use of this information. The findings also reveal differences in children's use of dialect cues as a function of the linguistic and cultural context in which they live in.

This research paper explores the role of speaker, listener and real-time social attention for pronoun comprehension in autistic and nonautistic children in northeast United States. We assessed the pronoun comprehension of 22 autistic children (average age of 62 months, range 46-80 months) and 22 nonautistic children (average age 44 months, range 30-57 months) matched on expressive vocabulary scores. We evaluated first- and second-person possessive pronoun comprehension ("my" and "your") using a game in which two experimenters hid stickers and provided clues to their location by providing a verbal clue (e.g., "It's in your box") with accompanying gaze to the addressee. We also coded each child's gaze to the speaker during the pronoun comprehension task. Findings suggest that both autistic and nonautistic children comprehend first- and second-person pronouns at levels above chance. Nonautistic children performed better at comprehending second-person pronouns than autistic children. For both groups, children were more accurate in their comprehension of the second-person pronoun "your" when it referred to themselves versus when it referred to the experimenter; errors more commonly reflected "self-bias" rather than pronoun reversal errors. Children who gazed at the speaker performed better in comprehending second-person pronouns than children who did not. Our results reveal considerable overlap in the strengths and challenges of young language learners with and without autism. Our findings suggest that children may benefit from repeated experiences across varied conversational settings-including addressed and non-addressed speech-to practice the synchronization of semantics and pragmatics in their ongoing mastery of language.

Young children in the U.S. tend to hold narrow, idealized prototypes for animal and social categories, focusing on ideas about how categories should be and ignoring category variability. The current studies (N = 281) tested how children's reliance on idealized prototypes might be shaped by adults' communication of common essentialist and teleological biases. In Study 1, 7- to 8-year-old U.S. children viewed more average members of novel animal categories as prototypical when they heard a teacher correct a generic statement about a characteristic feature and highlight how varied features serve varied functions. In Study 2, explanations about varied functions alone explained this effect for novel animals, with mixed effects for familiar animals; there was no additive effect of correcting generic language. Children in Study 2 also expected functionally ideal features to be more frequent among category members, suggesting that idealized prototypes reflect mistaken assumptions that category members homogeneously share ideal features. Children in Study 2 did not explicitly disapprove of nonconformity, suggesting that idealized prototypes do not reflect an inability to dissociate how things are from how they should be. Together, these results support the proposal that U.S. children's idealized prototypes are shaped by common conceptual biases perpetuated by cultural input.