Infants' representations of physical events are surprisingly flexible. Brief exposure to one event can immediately enhance infants' representations of another event. The present experiments tested two potential mechanisms underlying this priming: enhanced encoding or improved retrieval. Five-month-olds saw a target block become hidden inside a…

A long history of research has considered the role of iconicity in language and the existence and role of nonarbitrary properties in language and the use of language. Previous studies with Japanese-speaking children, whose language defines a large grammatical class of words with clear sound symbolism, suggest that iconicity properties in Japanese…

The traditional view of development is stage-like progress toward increasing complexity of form. However, the literature cites many examples in which children do worse before they do better. A major challenge for developmental theory, therefore, is to explain both global progress and apparent regression. In this article, we situate U-shaped…