Imitation plays a crucial role in early social learning. Numerous studies indicate that young children copy even actions that are clearly irrelevant for goal achievement--a phenomenon called overimitation (OI). The present study tested whether this finding can be generalized to different forms of faithful nonsense imitation presented in different…

Distinguishing easily confusable categories requires learners to detect their predictive differences. Interleaved sequences -- switching between categories -- help learners to detect such differences. Nonetheless, learners prefer to block -- switching within a category -- to detect commonalities. Across two 2 × 2-factorial experiments, we…

Both recent evidence and research-based early mathematics curricula indicate that repeating patterns--predictable sequences that follow a rule--are a topic of major importance for mathematics development. The purpose of the current study was to help build a theory for how early repeating patterning knowledge contributes to early math development,…

The procedural deficit hypothesis claims that impaired procedural learning is a causal risk factor for developmental dyslexia and developmental language disorder. We investigated the relationships between measures of basic cognitive processes (declarative learning, procedural learning and attention) and measures of attainment (reading, grammar and…

Sleep is considered to support the formation of skill memory. In juvenile but not adult song birds learning a tutor's song, a stronger initial deterioration of song performance over night-sleep predicts better song performance in the long run. This and similar observations have stimulated the view of sleep supporting skill formation during…

This study investigated visual statistical learning (VSL) in 24 deaf signers and 24 hearing non-signers. Previous research with hearing individuals suggests that SL mechanisms support literacy. Our first goal was to assess whether VSL was associated with reading ability in deaf individuals, and whether this relation was sustained by a link between…