Cognitive Development最新文献

Adolescence is marked by significant developmental changes that can influence language processing and control. This study aimed to uncover developmental differences in language co-activation and control in unbalanced Spanish (L1)-English (L2) bilinguals. Children and adolescents attending bilingual schools within a L1 monolingual context completed a picture-naming task including cognates and non-cognates nouns, with collection of behavioral and ERP data. The study consistently found a cognate facilitation effect (CFE) in L2, evident in enhanced accuracy, faster reaction times, and reduced N400 negativity for cognates in comparison with no-cognate nouns. However, in L1, CFE was only observed in the N400 component, indicating weaker transfer from L2 to L1. Additionally, children exhibited greater N200 negativity when naming cognates in L1, while adolescents showed no N200 modulations, suggesting differences in frontal control region involvement and potential differences in control strategies. Language co-activation appears independent of maturation, while language control depends on development.

The shape bias is an important word learning strategy in children’s language development. Although some studies have observed an absent or atypical shape bias in autistic children, there is no converging evidence regarding its underlying bases. Moreover, previous research has been exclusively conducted in learners of Indo-European languages, yet it is unclear whether the shape bias is a universal word learning constraint across languages. This study aims to investigate the shape bias and its association with shape representation ability in 40 1–3-year-old non-autistic children, and 41 2–6-year-old autistic children, exposed to Mandarin Chinese. The results suggested that Mandarin-exposed non-autistic children exhibited a shape bias, while autistic children did not. Further, a positive correlation was found between the shape representation accuracy and shape bias performance in the autistic group. These findings provide cross-linguistic evidence for the shape bias as a word learning constraint in non-autistic toddlers but challenges in utilizing this constraint in word learning by young autistic children. Importantly, these results shed new light on the critical role of abstract representations of object shape in facilitating shape bias knowledge in autistic children.

Once children have acquired the cardinality principle, they understand that the last number-word used in counting represents the total number of objects in a set. This principle is often assessed using the “How many?” task, which consists in asking “How many?” objects there are in a set after children have counted them. However, we show in this study that out of 188 kindergarteners (mean age: 4 ½ years), 42 (22,3 %) succeeded in repeating the last count word in the “How many?” task but failed to correctly apply the one-to-one correspondence principle during counting. Even when only the easiest countable sets were considered (i.e., linear and homogeneous collections or sets with a very limited number of objects), still more than 10 % of children from our sample repeated the last count word but failed to apply the one-to-one correspondence principle. Such developmental profile, in which children understand that the last word used in counting represents the total number of objects in a set but fail to grasp that each individual object must be associated with a single number word to determine this total, is not psychologically plausible. We conclude that the “How many?” task leads to an inaccurate assessment of the cardinality principle, in both its basic and more meaningful conception, in a non-negligible number of young children.

Children’s perceptions of similarity and dissimilarity between in- and out-groups and their associations with intergroup attitudes were examined. Using mixed qualitative and quantitative methods, 5- and 8-year-old Jewish-Israeli children (N = 100, 48 % girls) were investigated. They were asked about Arabs (which are considered a conflict out-group). Specifically, they were asked whether a Jewish girl/boy and an Arab girl/boy are similar or dissimilar and in what way. They were also asked about their attitudes towards Arabs. In general, children reported more intergroup dissimilarities than similarities between Jews and Arabs. Children’s perceptions revealed that they considered three types of properties as fundamental for intergroup (dis)similarity: appearance, psychological characteristics, and social identity. The results indicate that children form intergroup dissimilarity perceptions at an early age, but only at about 8 years of age do these perceptions become associated with negative attitudes towards the out-group. These findings highlight the importance of promoting early awareness of similarities between groups to mitigate the development of negative attitudes as children grow older.

Can children accurately date their early memories? This question has important real-life consequences such as when jurors evaluate the credibility of child eyewitness testimony in court. Answering this question is difficult given that adults present at remembered events may be inaccurate themselves in retroactively dating the memories recalled by their children, and often cannot provide reliable validation. In this study, prior to child interviews the parents of 6- to 13-year-olds provided eight memories of events with known dates, two each from when children were age 2, 3, 4, and 5 years. A total of 104 6- to 13-year-olds participated (47 % female, 70 % White and 26 % Asian or multi-ethnic), recruited from Canada (36 %) and USA (64 %). Children typically made systematic dating errors. Memories of events that had occurred when children had been age 2 were misdated by 1½ years on average, and as children’s age at the time of remembered events increased, misdating errors decreased. Errors usually involved children thinking they had been older at the time of remembered events than they actually were – a phenomenon termed ‘forward telescoping’ (versus ‘backward telescoping, when individuals think that they had been older at the time of remembered events than they actually had been). For example, many of the events from when children were age 2 were recalled by the children, but they misdated them to older ages. Although ‘age of memory’ (age of the child at the time of the remembered event) was significantly related to errors in dating, with more errors for memories from younger periods of their lives, ‘age of child’ at the time they did the memory task did not differ depending upon how old the children were. Findings have theoretical and forensic implications.