The current study investigated whether age-related changes in the conceptualization of social groups influences interpretation of the pronoun we. Sixty-four 2- and 4-year-olds (N = 29 female, 50 White-identifying) viewed scenarios in which it was ambiguous how many puppets performed an activity together. When asked who performed the activity, a…

This study examined the development of emotion understanding. Children (N = 296, 157 boys, 139 girls) and parents (67% White, 8% Black, 15% Hispanic, 2% Asian American, 6% Biracial, 2% "Other") recruited from Denver, Colorado were observed annually for four years starting in 2019 (beginning M[subscript age] = 2.44 years, SD = 0.26)…

A critical skill of childhood is learning social norms. We examine whether the generic pronouns "you" and "we," which frame information as applying to people in general rather than to a specific individual, facilitate this process. In one pre-registered experiment conducted online between 2020 and 2021, children 4- to…

This study investigated whether children can infer category properties based on how a speaker describes an individual (e.g., saying something is a "small zib" implies that zibs are generally bigger than this one). Three- to 5-year-olds (N = 264) from a university preschool and a children's museum were tested on their ability to make this…

Infants watched an experimenter retrieve a stuffed animal from an opaque box and then return it. This happened twice, consistent with either 1 animal appearing on 2 occasions or 2 identical-looking animals each appearing once. The experimenter labeled each object appearance with a different novel label. After infants retrieved 1 object from the…

Eighteen-month-olds' spatial categorization was tested when hearing a novel spatial word. Infants formed an abstract categorical representation of support (i.e., placing 1 object on another) when hearing a novel spatial particle during habituation but not when viewing the events in silence. Infants with a productive spatial vocabulary did not…

This study examined the relation of visual self-recognition to personal pronoun use and pretend play. For a longitudinal sample (N66) at the ages when self-recognition was emerging (15, 18, and 21 months), self-recognition was related to personal pronoun use and pretend play such that children showing self-recognition used more personal pronouns…

Infants of 18 and 24 months acquiring English were tested in a preferential looking task on their ability to detect ungrammaticalities caused by manipulating a single function word in sentences. Infants heard grammatical sentences in which the determiner "the" preceded a target noun, as well as three ungrammatical conditions in which "the" was…