The Early Development of Children's Communication about Nested Spatial Relations

This investigation examined how the nature of the spatial relation influences young children's ability to remember and communicate about nested landmarks. Of particular interest was whether young children are more likely to use a supporting than a proximal landmark to disambiguate identical landmarks (e.g., "it's in the basket on the table" vs. "it's in the basket next to the table"). 3- and 4-year-olds hid objects in a dollhouse and described their locations. Children had to disambiguate the target primary landmark by relating it to a supporting or proximal secondary landmark. Both age groups almost always provided the primary landmark, but 4-year-olds were more likely to provide the secondary landmark than were 3-year-olds. Moreover, children were more successful at providing supporting than proximal secondary landmarks. These results suggest that both referential communication skills and biases in coding location influence children's communication about nested landmarks.     

Semantic Constraints on Word Learning: Proper Names and Adjectives

4 experiments examined 3- and 4-year-olds' interpretations of novel words applied to familiar objects in the sentence frame, "This Y is X," where X is a novel word, and Y is a familiar basic-level count noun (e.g., "dog", "cup"). These novel words are ambiguous and could be interpreted either as proper names (e.g., "Fred") or as adjectives/mass nouns (e.g., "red"/"lead"). The experiments addressed 2 questions. First, do children appreciate that the words can be construed either as proper names referring to individuals or as adjectives/mass nouns referring to salient properties/material kinds? The results showed that children could easily make either interpretation. Second, what factors affect children's tendency to make either a proper name or an adjective/mass noun interpretation? In the experiments, children learned the novel words for a range of animals and artifacts. Most children who learned the words for typical pets (e.g., a bird) made proper name interpretations, as did the majority of those who learned the words for certain non-pet animals (e.g., a caterpillar) described as possessed by someone, but only about half of those who learned the words for such non-pet animals not so described. Very few children who learned the words for either simple (e.g., a shoe) or complex (e.g., a boat) artifacts made proper name interpretations. The results provide clear evidence of the role of semantic information in constraining children's interpretation of a novel word, and they help to refine an understanding of what counts as a nameable individual for preschoolers.     

Futility1 of Log‐Linear Smoothing when Equating with Unrepresentative Small Samples

The impact of log‐linear presmoothing on the accuracy of small sample chained equipercentile equating was evaluated under two conditions . In the first condition the small samples differed randomly in ability from the target population. In the second condition the small samples were systematically different from the target population. Results showed that equating with small samples (e.g., N < 25 or 50) using either raw or smoothed score distributions led to considerable large random equating error (although smoothing reduced random equating error). Moreover, when the small samples were not representative of the target population, the amount of equating bias also was quite large. It is concluded that although presmoothing can reduce random equating error, it is not likely to reduce equating bias caused by using an unrepresentative sample. Other alternatives to the small sample equating problem (e.g., the SiGNET design) which focus more on improving data collection are discussed.     

What makes a landmark effective? Sex differences in a navigation task

In Experiment 1, two groups of female rats were trained in a triangular pool to find a hidden platform whose location was defined in terms of a single a landmark, a cylinder outside the pool. For one group, the landmark had only a single pattern (i.e., it looked the same when approached from any direction), while for the other, the landmark contained four different patterns (i.e., it looked different when approached from different directions). The first group learned to swim to the platform more rapidly than the second. Experiment 2 confirmed this difference when female rats were trained in a circular pool but found that male rats learned equally rapidly (and as rapidly as females trained with the single-pattern landmark) with both landmarks. This second finding was confirmed in Experiment 3. Finally, in Experiment 4a and 4b, male and female rats were trained either with the same, single-pattern landmark on all trials or with a different landmark each day. Males learned equally rapidly (and as rapidly as females trained with the unchanged landmark) whether the landmark changed or not. We conclude that male and female rats learn rather different things about the landmark that signals the location of the platform.     

Reading to Children and Listening to Children Read: Mother–Child Interactions as a Function of Principal Reader

Research Findings: Although storybook reading has received considerable research attention, listening to children read has been the source of much less inquiry. In this study, 40 mother–child dyads were videotaped during adult-to-child and child-to-adult reading. Relations between book-related themes (e.g., types of talk), maternal evaluative feedback (e.g., praise, criticism), maternal miscue feedback (e.g., graphophonemic clues, terminal feedback), and child engagement (e.g., laughter, questions) were analyzed. The results suggest that the development of literacy appreciation and literacy skill can occur during the same storybook-reading session. Specifically, when mothers read to their children, communication about the illustrations was associated with increased child engagement, yet a positive correlation was also observed between text-related productions and child engagement. When children read to their mothers, text-related productions were featured more prominently. After children made reading errors (miscues), graphophonemic and terminal feedback were the 2 most frequent responses by mothers. In addition, graphophonemic cues were positively associated with child engagement. Practice or Policy: In sum, the results demonstrate that adult-to-child and child-to-adult reading serve the goals of both literacy acquisition training and literacy appreciation; furthermore, orienting children toward the text during either session did not hamper child engagement.     

Preference between fixed-interval and variable-interval schedules of reinforcement: Separate roles of temporal scaling and predictability

Pigeons’ preference between fixed-interval and variable-interval schedules was examined using a concurrent-chains procedure. Responses to two concurrently available keys in the initial links of the concurrent chains occasionally produced terminal links where further responses were reinforced under either a fixed- or variable-interval schedule. In previous studies, preferences for the variable schedule with such a procedure have been interpreted as reflecting atemporal scaling process that heavily weights the shorter intervals in the variable schedule. The present experiment examined whetherpredictability, i.e., the presence of external stimuli correlated with the reinforcement interval, might also influence preference in such situations. When the two intervals in a variable schedule were made predictable by being associated with different key colors, preference for that schedule increased. This increase was reliable but small in magnitude and transient when initial-link responses only occasionally produced terminal links; it was large in magnitude when only one response in the initial link was required to produce the appropriate terminal-link schedule. The results suggest that preference between fixed and variable schedules may be influenced both by temporal scaling and to a lesser extent by predictability of the reinforcement intervals.     

Children's Causal Explanations of Animate and Inanimate Motion

Adults frequently refer to nonobvious, internal, or immanent causal mechanisms when explaining certain kinds of movement— such as the movement of animals (e.g., a rabbit hops because of its brain and muscles) and the self-sustained movement of artifacts (e.g., a toy moves on its own because of batteries or gears). This series of studies examined whether and when preschool children are willing to attribute internal and immanent causes to motion. In 3 studies, preschool children and adults viewed animals and artifacts (wind-up toys and transparent objects) either moving independently or being transported by a person. Children explained animal and artifact events differently, even with the kind of movement controlled: They were more likely to attribute immanent cause to animals than to artifacts and more likely to attribute human cause to artifacts than animals. Internal causes were less frequently endorsed overall; however, when asked to describe the insides of artifacts, children who saw them moving alone more often described internal mechanisms (e.g., batteries, electricity) than children who did not see them moving alone. Altogether, the studies suggest that children as young as 3 or 4 years of age honor two principles: For animals more than for artifacts, movement is caused by an immanent source, and across domains, movements without an observable agent have an internal or immanent source.     

Is children's spelling naturally stage-like?

Children's spelling development is often described by researchers and educators as proceeding through a series of stages. Two properties of stages were analyzed in this study. If spelling development can be characterized by stages, then it should be possible to observe qualitatively different spellings at different points in development. In addition, spellings within a point of development must be consistent. Spelling samples were obtained from stories written by children in first through sixth grade. Stage classifications of spellings for (a) silent -e long vowel words (e.g., bake), and (b) regularly affixed past tense words phonologically represented as /t/ (e.g., helped), /d/ (e.g., opened), and /ed/ (e.g., listed) were analyzed. Little evidence was found for either predicted qualitative differences in stage classification of errors or in stage constancy across grades. Implications for theories of spelling development and instructional practice are discussed.     

Escape From Metaignorance: How Children Develop an Understanding of Their Own Lack of Knowledge

Previous research yielded conflicting results about when children can accurately assess their epistemic states in different hiding tasks. In Experiment 1, ninety‐two 3‐ to 7‐year‐olds were either shown which object was hidden inside a box, were totally ignorant about what it could be, or were presented with two objects one of which was being put inside (partial exposure). Even 3‐year‐olds could assess their epistemic states in the total ignorance and the complete knowledge task. However, only children older than 5 could assess their ignorance in the partial exposure task. In Experiment 2 with one hundred and one 3‐ to 7‐year‐olds, similar results were found for children under 5 years even when more objects were shown in partial exposure tasks. Implications for children’s developing theory of knowledge are discussed.     

Specifying the Relation between Novel and Known: Input Affects the Acquisition of Novel Color Terms

4 studies investigate how differential input affects preschoolers' abilities to learn novel color words. 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children saw objects in novel shapes and colors and heard a novel color label for the object. Labels were presented through ostensive definition (e.g., "See, it's mauve"), corrective linguistic contrast (e.g., "See, it's not purple; it's mauve"), or an inclusion statement (e.g., "See, it's mauve; it's a kind of purple"). 4- and 5-year-old children interpreted the novel word as a shape term when ostensive information was provided but as a color term when additional information, either contrastive or inclusive, specified a relation between the novel term and a known label for that color. Furthermore, children who consistently interpreted the novel word as a color word tended to treat the novel and known labels as mutually exclusive color terms if they heard contrastive information, whereas they tended to treat the words as hierarchically related if they heard inclusion information. 3-year-olds generally did not make use of either type of information in determining the semantic domain of the novel word or the relation between terms.     

Very young children's memory for the location of objects in a large-scale environment

2 experiments were carried out to investigate 18- to 30-month-old children's memory for the location of a hidden object. In the first experiment, young children were observed in 2 different memory-for-location tasks, both conducted in their own homes. In 1, a toy was hidden in a natural location, and in the other it was hidden in one of a set of boxes with picture cues on top of them. Memory performance was significantly better when the toy was hidden within the natural environment. The effect of different types of hiding locations was examined further in the second experiment. No age differences were found when an object was hidden either in the natural environment or in 1 of a set of unmarked boxes (although performance was better in the former condition). However, in the third condition the older subjects (24-30 months) effectively used a landmark cue (a nearby piece of furniture) to help them remember in which plain box a toy had been hidden, but the young subjects (18-22 months) did not profit from such potential cues. The results, as well as some previous research with delayed-response tasks, were interpreted as reflecting developmental changes in very young children's ability to exploit available cues. The pattern of results suggested the possibility that 2-year-old children are capable of a simple form of mnemonic strategy, actively associating an available cue with the information to be remembered.     

Syllabic Strategy as Opposed to Coda Optimization in the Segmentation of Spanish Letter-Strings Using Word Spotting

A word-spotting task is used in Spanish to test the way in which polysyllabic letter-strings are parsed in this language. Monosyllabic words (e.g., bar) embedded at the beginning of a pseudoword were immediately followed by either a coda-forming consonant (e.g., barto) or a vowel (e.g., baros). In the former case, the embedded word corresponds to the first spoken syllable, whereas it cuts across the syllable boundary in the latter case. Unlike a previous study in English using the same methodology (Taft & Álvarez, 2014), the embedded word was found to be easier to detect when followed by a consonant than a vowel, at least for low-frequency words. It was concluded that phonological recoding is more important in the parsing of Spanish words than English words, where maximization of the coda dominates instead.     

Acquiring Proper Nouns for Familiar and Unfamiliar Animate Objects: Two-Year-Olds' Word-learning Biases

In 2 studies, 2-year-old children learned a novel word modeled as a proper noun (e.g., "This is Zav") for an animate stuffed toy. Children who learned the word for a familiar object (i.e., one for which they knew a basic-level count noun for the kind) interpreted the word appropriately as a proper noun reliably more often than children who learned the word for an unfamiliar object (i.e., one for which they did not know such a count noun). When the creature was familiar, children typically interpreted the novel word as if it were a proper noun referring uniquely to the labeled individual. When the animal was unfamiliar, children frequently interpreted the word as if it were a count noun referring to a kind of object. Children's spontaneous comments during the tasks provided striking additional evidence that their interpretations of the proper noun varied with the familiarity of the object. The results suggest that young children's sensitivity to the form class of proper nouns is affected by the familiarity of the referent object. The findings are discussed in terms of interpretative biases in word learning.     

Children's use of nonegocentric standards in judgments of functional size

Dimensional adjectives are inherently relative in meaning, and so provide a test of children's ability to apply nonegocentric standards. The present research investigates children's ability to apply one kind of relative standard assessing the size of an object with regard to its intended use (a functional interpretation). In 3 experiments, children 3-5 years of age were asked to judge objects as "big" or "little" according to their function (e.g., a hat for a doll; a key for a door). Contrary to previous claims, the ability to use nonegocentric functional standards was present by age 3. However, 3-year-olds performed above chance only when their attention was directed to the relevant function, either by means of action (when actually shown how the objects fit together) or by means of language. In contrast, 4-year-olds performed well without additional action-based or linguistic cues. It is suggested that children have an implicit ordering in their interpretations of big and little, such that functional judgments are lower in priority than 2 other standards: normative (the size of an object is compared to a stored mental standard, e.g., a chihuahua is small for a dog) and perceptual (the size of an object is compared to another physically present object of the same type, e.g., a chihuahua 6 inches tall is big compared to a chihuahua 4 inches tall). Even 3-year-olds can make nonegocentric functional judgments of relative size, but the basis of the judgment must be unambiguous.     

The Effects of Perceived Daily Social and Academic Failure Experiences on School-Age Children's Subsequent Interactions with Parents

The hypothesis that perceived failure experiences at school would increase the likelihood of aversive parent-child interactions after school was supported in a study of 167 fourth, fifth, and sixth graders. Children completed measures of mood, school events, and parent-child interaction 3 times each day for 2 consecutive days. Reports of social and academic failure experiences at school (e.g., peer problems and difficulty with schoolwork) were associated with increases in child self-reports of demanding and aversive behavior toward parents that evening. There was no evidence of the reverse effect, aversive child behavior did not predict an increase in reports of negative events the next day. When children rated more academic failure events at school, they also described their parents as more disapproving and punishing after school. However, this effect was only partially mediated by increases in the child's aversive behavior. It is argued that the findings cannot be explained solely by a response bias caused by the child's general mood or frame of mind that day. First, school-to-home mood spillover effects were controlled in the analyses. Second, reports of problems at school were not associated with other aspects of parent-child interaction (e.g., the parent's positive behavioral and emotional involvement with the child). In addition to its substantive findings, the study illustrates use of an unbiased method for assessing child responses to daily stressors.     

Discontinuity of Reference Hinders Children's Learning of New Words

When referring to objects, adults package words, sentences, and gestures in ways that shape children's learning. Here, to understand how continuity of reference shapes word learning, an adult taught new words to 4-year-old children (N = 120) using either clusters of references to the same object or no sequential references to each object. In three experiments, the adult used a combination of labels and other object references, which provided informative discourse (e.g., This is small and green), neutral discourse (e.g., This is really great), or no verbal discourse. Switching verbal references from one object to another interfered with learning relative to providing clustered references to a particular object, revealing that discontinuity in discourse hinders children's encoding of new words.     

Feature-positive discriminations during a spatial-search task with humans

During feature-positive operant discriminations, a conditional cue, X, signals whether responses made during a second stimulus, A, are reinforced. Few studies have examined how landmarks, which can be trained to control the spatial distribution of responses during search tasks, might operate under conditional control. We trained college students to search for a target hidden on a computer monitor. Participants learned that responses to a hidden target location signaled by a landmark (e.g., A) would be reinforced only if the landmark was preceded by a colored background display (e.g., X). In Experiment 1, participants received feature-positive training (+←YB/ XA→+/A?/B?) with the hidden target to the right of A and to left of B. Responding during nonreinforced transfer test trials (XB?/YA?) indicated conditional control by the colored background, and spatial accuracy indicated a greater weighting of spatial information provided by the landmark than by the conditional cue. In Experiments 2a and 2b, the location of the target relative to landmark A was conditional on the colored background (+←YA/ XA→+/ ZB→+/ +←C /A?/B?). At test, conditional control and a greater weighting for the landmark’s spatial information were again found, but we also report evidence for spatial interference by the conditional stimulus. Overall, we found that hierarchical accounts best explain the observed differences in response magnitude, whereas spatial accuracy was best explained via spatial learning models that emphasize the reliability, stability, and proximity of landmarks to a target.     

How Two- and Four-Year-Old Children Interpret Adjectives and Count Nouns

We examined the role of object kind familiarity (i.e., knowledge of a count noun for an object) on preschoolers' sensitivity to the relation between a novel word's form class (adjective or count noun) and its reference (to a material kind-property or to an object kind). We used a forced-choice match-to-target task, in which children learned a word for one object (e.g., a metal cup), and then chose between 2 other objects. One was from the same object kind but a different material kind (with different related properties, such as color and texture; e.g., a white plastic cup); the other was from a different object kind but the same material kind (with the same related properties; e.g., a metal spoon). In Experiment 1, children learned either a count noun (e.g., "This is a zav") or an adjective (e.g., "This is a zav one"). Within each form class, we crossed the familiarity of the referent object kind (familiar and unfamiliar) with the age of the children (2- and 4-year-olds). The principal finding was that in interpreting an adjective, 4-year-olds were more likely to choose the object sharing material kind with the target if the target was familiar than if it was unfamiliar. No such familiarity effect was evident among 2-year-olds. In Experiment 2, we employed a more unambiguously adjectival frame (e.g., "This is a very zav-ish one"), and replicated the results of Experiment 1. We interpret the results in terms of 2 proposed word learning biases: one that learners initially expect any word applied to an unfamiliar object to refer to a (basic-level) kind of object, and a second that learners prefer words to contrast in meaning. We consider several interpretations of the observed age difference.     

A nonverbal false belief task: the performance of children and great apes

A nonverbal task of false belief understanding was given to 4- and 5-year-old children (N = 28) and to two species of great ape: chimpanzees and orangutans (N = 7). The task was embedded in a series of finding games in which an adult (the hider) hid a reward in one of two identical containers, and another adult (the communicator) observed the hiding process and attempted to help the participant by placing a marker on the container that she believed to hold the reward. An initial series of control trials ensured that participants were able to use the marker to locate the reward, follow the reward in both visible and invisible displacements, and ignore the marker when they knew it to be incorrect. In the crucial false belief trials, the communicator watched the hiding process and then left the area, at which time the hider switched the locations of the containers. When the communicator returned, she marked the container at the location where she had seen the reward hidden, which was incorrect. The hider then gave the subject the opportunity to find the sticker. Successful performance required participants to reason as follows: the communicator placed the marker where she saw the reward hidden; the container that was at that location is now at the other location; so the reward is at the other location. Children were also given a verbal false belief task in the context of this same hiding game. The two main results of the study were: (1) children's performance on the verbal and nonverbal false belief tasks were highly correlated (and both fit very closely with age norms from previous studies), and (2) no ape succeeded in the nonverbal false belief task even though they succeeded in all of the control trials indicating mastery of the general task demands.