The goal of science is to advance our understanding of particular phenomenon. However, in the case of understanding development, the phenomena of interest are complex, multifaceted, and change over time. We use three decades of research on the shape bias to argue for a focus not on replication of single studies, but rather an integration across findings to create a coherent understanding of the thoughts and behaviors of young children. The "shape bias", or the tendency to generalize a novel label to novel objects of the same shape, is a reliable and robust behavioral finding and has been shown to predict future vocabulary growth and possible language disorders. Despite the reliability of the phenomenon, the way in which the shape bias is defined and tested has varied across studies and laboratories. The current review argues that differences in performance that come from even seemingly minor changes to the participants or task can offer critical insight to underlying mechanisms, and that working to incorporate data from multiple labs is an important way to reveal how task variation and a child's individual pathway create behavior-a key issue for understanding developmental phenomena.

Executive function (EF) plays a foundational role in development. A brain-based model of EF development is probed for the experiences that strengthen EF in the dimensional change card sort task in which children sort cards by one rule and then are asked to switch to another. Three-year-olds perseverate on the first rule, failing the task, whereas 4-year-olds pass. Three predictions of the model are tested to help 3-year-olds (N = 54) pass. Experiment 1 shows that experience with shapes and the label "shape" helps children. Experiment 2 shows that experience with colors-without a label-helps children. Experiment 3 shows that experience with colors induces dimensional attention. The implications of this work for early intervention are discussed. The emergence of executive function (EF) abilities during early childhood plays a foundational role in development. EF refers to a set of neurocognitive processes involved in goal-directed behavior (Blair

While statistical word learning has been the focus of many studies on monolinguals, it has received little attention in bilinguals. The results of existing studies on statistical word learning in bilinguals are inconsistent, with some research reporting a bilingual advantage over monolinguals but others finding no difference between groups. Thus, our study will investigate statistical learning using the Cross-Situational Statistical Learning paradigm in two groups of English-German bilinguals (balanced and unbalanced) and English monolinguals. Participants will learn 1:1 mappings (one word maps onto one object) and 1:2 mappings (one word maps onto two objects). In contrast to previous studies, we will measure learning continuously and analyse trial-by-trial behaviour closely to understand fine-grained learning differences across language groups. We predict that it will generally be easier to acquire 1:1 than 1:2 mappings. More importantly, we predict that bilinguals will outperform monolinguals for 1:2 mappings only, consistent with a limited bilingual advantage.

No abstract

No abstract