Developing attention skills allow children to parse their complex world by orienting to a subset of especially salient or meaningful inputs. Infants and children are biased to orient to faces and have difficulty ignoring faces when they appear as distractors. Although these past findings suggest that faces are more salient than nonsocial stimuli,…

According to prediction-based learning theories, erroneous predictions support learning. However, empirical evidence for a relation between prediction error and children's language learning is currently lacking. Here we investigated whether and how prediction errors influence children's learning of novel words. We hypothesized that word learning…

We investigated toddlers' phonological representations of common vowel-initial words that can take on multiple surface forms in the input. In French, liaison consonants are inserted and are syllabified as onsets in subsequent vowel-initial words, for example, petit /t/ éléphant [little elephant]. We aimed to better understand the impact on…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

Time is central to any understanding of the world. In adults, estimation errors grow linearly with the length of the interval, much faster than would be expected of a clock-like mechanism. Here we present the first direct demonstration that this is also true in human infants. Using an eye-tracking paradigm, we examined 4-, 6-, 10-, and…