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…

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…

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…