Children are frequently confronted with so-called "test questions". While genuine questions are requests for missing information, test questions ask for information obviously already known to the questioner. In this study we explored whether two-year-old children respond differentially to one and the same question used as either a genuine question…

Three- and four-year-old children were asked predicate-focus questions ("What's X doing?") about a scene in which an agent performed an action on a patient. We varied: (i) whether (or not) the preceding discourse context, which established the patient as given information, was available for the questioner; and (ii) whether (or not) the patient was…

Study of a one-year-old's earliest use of prepositions found that spatial oppositions ("up-down") were learned first, and used in non-prepositional senses prior to prepositional usage. "With,""by,""to,""for,""at," and "of" were learned later and used to express case relationships and more often misused and omitted than the earlier-learned…

Describes a lexical training program developed to teach object, visible movement, and invisible movement words to children at stage 5 (N=7) and stage 6 (N=16) object permanence development. Stage 6 children learned all three types of words equally well, while stage 5 children learned object and visible movement but not invisible movement words.…