The authors examine recent theoretical perspectives of the development of the animate-inanimate distinction in infancy. From these theoretical views emerge 7 characteristic properties, each related to physical or psychological causality, that distinguish animates from inanimates. The literature is reviewed for evidence of infants' ability to perceive and understand each of these properties. Infants associate some animate properties with people by 6 months, but they do not associate the appropriate properties to the broad category of animates and inanimates until at least the middle of the 2nd year. The authors offer a theoretical proposal whereby infants acquire knowledge about the properties of different object kinds through a sensitive perceptual system and a domain general associative learning mechanism that extracts correlations among dynamic and static features.

Bilingual children have been shown to outperform monolingual children on tasks measuring executive functioning skills. This advantage is usually attributed to bilinguals’ extensive practice in exercising selective attention and cognitive flexibility during language use because both languages are active when one of them is being used. We examined whether this advantage is observed in 24-month-olds who have had much less experience in language production. A battery of executive functioning tasks and the cognitive scale of the Bayley test were administered to 63 monolingual and bilingual children. Native bilingual children performed significantly better than monolingual children on the Stroop task, with no difference between groups on the other tasks, confirming the specificity of bilingual effects to conflict tasks reported in older children. These results demonstrate that bilingual advantages in executive control emerge at an age not previously shown.

The effect of bilingualism on the cognitive skills of young children was investigated by comparing performance of 162 children who belonged to one of two age groups (approximately 3-and 4½-year-olds) and one of three language groups on a series of tasks examining executive control and word mapping. The children were monolingual English speakers, monolingual French speakers, or bilinguals who spoke English and one of a large number of other languages. Monolinguals obtained higher scores than bilinguals on a receptive vocabulary test and were more likely to demonstrate the mutual exclusivity constraint, especially at the younger ages. However, bilinguals obtained higher scores than both groups of monolinguals on three tests of executive functioning: Luria's tapping task measuring response inhibition, the Opposite Worlds task requiring children to assign incongruent labels to a sequence of animal pictures, and reverse categorization in which children needed to reclassify a set of objects into incongruent categories after an initial classification. There were no differences between the groups in the ANT flanker task requiring executive control to ignore a misleading cue. This evidence for a bilingual advantage in aspects of executive functioning at an earlier age than previously reported is discussed in terms of the possibility that bilingual language production may not be the only source of these developmental effects.One of the most crucial cognitive developments in early childhood is the emergence of the executive function system (Diamond, 2002). These executive processes are the basis for all higher thought, including control of attention (needed for selection and inhibition of the variety of environmental cues), working memory (needed for planning and maintaining set), and switching (needed for multitasking). Research with preschool children has shown that bilingual children develop control over these executive processes earlier than monolingual children (Bialystok, 2001). Importantly, these bilingual advantages are found not only on verbal tasks where executive control to resolve conflict between form and meaning gives bilinguals an advantage on metalinguistic tasks (Bialystok, 1988;Cromdal, 1999;Galambos & Goldin-Meadow, 1990) but also on nonverbal tasks where no explicit linguistic processing is involved (reviewed below).Correspondence should be sent to Ellen Bialystok, Department of Psychology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5R 3A8, Canada. ellenb@yorku.ca. NIH Public AccessAuthor Manuscript J Cogn Dev. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2011 October 1. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author ManuscriptThe basis for the bilingual advantage is commonly assumed to be in the constant need for bilinguals to control attention to two language systems, a process that boosts those attentional processes for all tasks including nonverbal ones. But how much experience in attending to two languages is necessary for these generalized effects to appear? If these ad...

Infants’ visual preferences for gender-stereotyped toys and their knowledge of stereotyped toys were examined in two experiments using an adaptation of the preferential looking paradigm. Girls and boys aged 12, 18, and 24 months were tested for their preference for photos of vehicles or dolls, and for whether they associated (“matched”) these two stereotyped sets of toys with the faces and voices of male and female children. Results of Experiment 1 (N = 77) demonstrated significant preferences for gender stereotyped toys appearing by 18 months of age. In Experiment 2 (N = 58), girls were able to associate the gender-stereotyped toys with girls’ and boys’ faces by 18 months of age, but boys were not. Implications for theories of early gender development are discussed.

This study compares lexical access and expressive and receptive vocabulary development in monolingual and bilingual toddlers. More specifically, the link between vocabulary size, production of translation equivalents, and lexical access in bilingual infants was examined as well as the relationship between the Communicative Development Inventories and the Computerized Comprehension Task. Twenty-five bilingual and 18 monolingual infants aged 24 months participated in this study. The results revealed significant differences between monolingual and bilinguals’ expressive vocabulary size in L1 but similar total vocabularies. Performance on the Computerized Comprehension Task revealed no differences between the two groups on measures of both reaction time and accuracy, and a strong convergent validity of the Computerized Comprehension Task with the Communicative Development Inventories was observed for both groups. Bilinguals with a higher proportion of translation equivalents in their expressive vocabulary showed faster access to words in the Computerized Comprehension Task.