Two experiments investigated children's communicative perspective-taking ability. In Experiment 1, 4- to 5-year-old children were tested on two referential communication tasks, as well as on measures of inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Results document children's emergent use of the perspective of their speaking partner to guide their communicative behaviors in both a production and comprehension task. In Experiment 2, 3- to 4-year-old children used a speaker's perspective to guide their interpretation of instructions. In both experiments, egocentric interpretations of speaker requests were negatively correlated with children's inhibitory control skills. Results of these studies demonstrate that young children can differentiate between information that is accessible to the speaker versus privileged knowledge, and use this information to guide their communicative behaviors. Furthermore, the results suggest that children's inhibitory control skills allow them to inhibit their own perspective, enabling them to make use of their communicative partner's perspective.

This study examined the influence of shape similarity and labels on 13-month-olds' inductive inferences. In 3 experiments, 123 infants were presented with novel target objects with or without a nonvisible property, followed by test objects that varied in shape similarity. When objects were not labeled, infants generalized the nonvisible property to high-similarity objects (Experiment 1). When objects were labeled with the same noun, infants generalized the nonvisible property to high- and low-similarity objects (Experiment 2). Finally, when objects were labeled with different nouns, infants generalized the nonvisible property to high-similarity objects (Experiment 3). Thus, infants who are beginning to acquire productive language rely on shared shape similarity and shared names to guide their inductive inferences.

This study examined the influence of object labels and shape similarity on 16- to 21-month-old infants' inductive inferences. In three experiments, a total of 144 infants were presented with novel target objects with or without a nonobvious property, followed by test objects that varied in shape similarity to the target. When objects were not labeled, infants generalized the nonobvious property to test objects that were highly similar in shape (Experiment 1). When objects were labeled with novel nouns, infants relied both on shape similarity and shared labels to generalize properties (Experiment 2). Finally, when objects were labeled with familiar nouns, infants generalized the properties to those objects that shared the same label, regardless of shape similarity (Experiment 3). The results of these experiments delineate the role of perceptual similarity and conceptual information in guiding infants' inductive inferences.

CONTEXT: Early language development supports cognitive, academic, and behavioral success. Identifying modifiable predictors of child language may inform policies and practices aiming to promote language development. OBJECTIVE: To synthesize results of observational studies examining parenting behavior and early childhood language in typically developing samples.

A total of 3387 pregnant women (aged 19 to 47 years), residing in Calgary, Canada, were recruited between May 2008 and May 2011. Women were eligible if they were at less than 25 weeks of gestation at the time of recruitment, at least 18 years old, were accessing prenatal care in Calgary, Canada, and were able to complete written questionnaires in English. The AOB study was approved by the Conjoint Health Research Ethics Board at the University of

Both biological and environmental factors were associated with the development of late talking. Biological factors placed toddlers at risk for late talking, and facets of the environment played a protective role. Enveloping infants and toddlers in language-rich milieus that promote opportunities for playing, reading, and sharing books daily may decrease risk for delayed early vocabulary.

This study examined whether 12-month-olds will accept words that differ phonologically and phonetically from their native language as object labels in an associative learning task. Sixty infants were presented with sets of English word-object (N = 30), Japanese word-object (N = 15), or Czech word-object (N = 15) pairings until they habituated. Infants associated CVCV English, CCVC English, and CVCV Japanese words, but not CCVC Czech words, with novel objects. These results demonstrate that by 12 months of age, infants are beginning to apply their language-specific knowledge to their acceptance of word forms. That is, they will not map words that violate the phonotactics of their native language to objects.

The present studies test two hypotheses: (1) that pedagogical contexts especially convey generic information (Csibra & Gergely, 2009), and (2) that young children are sensitive to this aspect of pedagogy. We examined generic language (e.g., “Elephants live in Africa”) in three studies, focusing on: informational versus narrative children’s books (Study 1), the language of 6-year-old children and adults assuming either a pedagogical (teacher) or non-pedagogical (friend) role (Study 2), and the language of 5-year-old children and adults speaking to either an ignorant alien (pedagogical context) or a peer (non-pedagogical context; Study 3). Results suggest that generics are more frequent in informational than narrative texts. Furthermore, both adults and young children provide more generic language in pedagogical contexts and when assuming a pedagogical role. Together, the studies demonstrate that pedagogical contexts are distinctive in conveying generic information, and that children are sensitive to this aspect of the language input. We suggest that generic knowledge is more useful in making predictions about the future, and thus more highly valued during instruction.