This study investigates the possibility that solitary dialog, in which individuals construct in writing a hypothetical dialogic argument, may more fully reveal individual skill achievement in argument than do conventional argumentive essays. A sample of 54 11-12-year-old Chinese students individually composed such written dialogs, subsequent to…

Prior work showed that infants look longer at impossible figures than possible ones, although it is unclear whether they or older children understand "impossibility." We employed a series of matching and sorting tasks with pictures and objects to evaluate children's knowledge of this dimension. In Experiment 1, nearly all children…

Recent research found no evidence that children aged 7-10 years are able to direct their attention to more valuable information in working memory. The current experiments examined whether children demonstrate this ability when the reward system used to motivate participants is engaging and age-appropriate. This was explored across different memory…

Many words are associated with more than a single meaning. Words are sometimes "ambiguous," applying to unrelated meanings, but the majority of frequent words are "polysemous" in that they apply to multiple "related" meanings. In a preregistered design that included 2 tasks, we tested adults' and 4.5- to 7-year-old…

The age at which people acquire a word influences word recognition, known as the age of acquisition (AoA) effect. In the first language (L1), AoA effects are widely found in various languages and experimental tasks. Arbitrary Mapping Hypothesis proposes that AoA effects reflect the loss of network plasticity during the learning of mappings between…

When telling a story, a speaker needs to refer to story characters using appropriate expressions, which requires a mental model of the discourse. We hypothesize that, compared to those of adults, children's discourse models are based more on factors that are less cognitively demanding, such as animacy, and as they grow older, discourse factors…

Purpose: Language production, a dynamic process involving real-time language processing, is crucial for children's language and communication development. To explore the early development of children's real-time language production, this study investigated Chinese preschool children's pausing strategies in narratives and their associations with…

The actions carried out by children are a mechanism that enables them to come into contact with their environment, assimilating it, acting on it, and thereby transforming it. From this perspective, an exploratory study has been designed to analyse the actions carried out by 87 children aged 1-3 years old in two task-situations involving the…

Differences in motivation during adolescence relative to childhood and adulthood in autism was tested in a cross-sectional study. 156 Typically developing individuals and 79 individuals with autism ages 10-30 years of age completed a go/nogo task with social and non-social cues. To assess age effects, linear and quadratic models were used.…

Fourteen-month-old infants are unable to link minimal pair nonsense words with novel objects (Stager & Werker, 1997). Might an adult's productions in a word learning context support minimal pair word-object association in these infants? We recorded a mother interacting with her 24-month-old son, and with her 5-month-old son, producing nonsense…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to quantify changes in speech intelligibility in two cohorts of people with Parkinson's disease (PD; those with and without deep brain stimulation [DBS]) across a broad range of self-selected speech rate alterations in: (1) read sentences; and (2) extemporaneous speech (monologues). Method: Four speaker groups…

Preschoolers' earliest productions of sentential complement sentences have matrix clauses that are limited in form. Diessel proposed that matrix clauses in these early productions are propositionally empty fixed phrases that lack semantic and syntactic integration with the clausal complement. By 4 years of age, however, preschoolers produce…

Adults conceptualize God as particularly knowledgeable -- more knowledgeable than humans -- about moral transgressions. We investigated how younger (4- to 5-year-old) and older (6- to 7-year-old) children view God's moral knowledge. Cultural narratives in the United States portray God as omniscient, which could lead children growing up in the…

Children have a powerful ability to track probabilistic information, but there are also situations in which young learners simply follow what another person says or does at the cost of obtaining rewards. This latter phenomenon, sometimes termed bias to trust in testimony, has primarily been studied in children preschool-age and younger, presumably…

Purpose: We proposed and tested a causal instantiation of the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) framework, linking acoustics, intelligibility, and communicative participation in the context of dysarthria. Method: Speech samples and communicative participation scores were collected…