Three-year-olds often respond to lies as if they were true or with no clear rationale. Individual differences influence children's processing of misinformation. Here, we explore how two contextual cues (children's conflicting first-hand knowledge and different information sources) affect their ability to correctly interpret and respond to…

Although stories for children often feature supernatural and fantastical events, children themselves often prefer realistic events when choosing what should happen in a story. In two experiments, we investigated whether 3- to 5-year-olds (total N = 240 from diverse backgrounds) might be more likely to include fantastical events in stories about…

This paper presents an initial analysis of 10 Preschool children's responses to a look-draw-trace-draw task. The findings suggest that figure-tracing helped half the children to produce a more accurate representation of the geometric figure presented to them, in their second drawing.

People sometimes commit 'egocentric errors', failing to ignore their own perspective when interpreting others' communication. Training imitation-inhibition, when participants perform the opposite action from another person, facilitates subsequent perspective-taking in adults. This study tested whether imitation-inhibition training also facilitates…

Purpose: The finite verb morphology composite (FVMC) is a valid measure for charting children's tense development and for differentiating children with and without language impairment during preschool and early elementary years. However, it is unclear whether FVMC scores vary as a function of language sample elicitation contexts. The current study…

We investigated how Central Swedish-speaking four to eleven-year-old children acquire the prosodic marking of narrow focus, compared to adult controls. Three measurements were analysed: placement of the prominence-marking high tone (prominence H), pitch range effects of the prominence H, and word duration. Subject-verb-object sentences were…

We systematically compared beliefs about animal (e.g., "lion"), artifactual (e.g., "hammer"), and institutional (e.g., "police officer") categories, aiming to identify whether people draw different inferences about which categories are subjective and which are socially constituted. We conducted two studies with 270…

The study sought to understand the general trajectory of children's executive function, as well as whether there was heterogeneity among monolingual English-speaking and dual language learning children in their growth of executive function. In addition, the study examined whether monolingual English-speaking and dual language learning children…

Early childhood is marked by significant developmental changes in the ability to recognize facial expressions. However, since the COVID-19 outbreak, people have been wearing masks more frequently during social interactions which may hamper the recognition of facial expressions. This study examines whether preschoolers recognize the facial…

Understanding that hypothesis testing is aimed at seeking information rather than producing desirable outcomes is indispensable for designing informative experiments. This study investigated the developmental course of information seeking compared to producing an effect in young children. In a between-subjects design, 4- to 6-year-olds (N = 109)…

Verbs serve as the architectural centerpiece of sentences, making verb learning pivotal for language acquisition. Verb learning requires both the formation of a verb-action mapping and the abstraction of relations between an object and its action. Two competing positions have been proposed to explain the process of verb learning: (a) seeing a…

The extant literature on the use of autonomy support during caregiver-child conversations has focused primarily on conversations about fun, shared experiences, with limited consideration of unshared experiences or attention toward the role of conversation context. The present study examined how autonomy support, conversation context, and child age…

Aspectual and mood morphology are vulnerable domains in adult heritage speakers. This paper investigates the root of such vulnerability within the domain of Turkish evidentiality system by comparing 20 second-generation adult and 20 school-age child Turkish heritage speakers to 20 first-generation immigrants (main input providers for child…

Languages differ in their realization of the subject argument: non-null-subject languages, like English, require subjects to be phonologically overt; rather, null-subject languages, like Greek, allow the subject to be overt or null. This cross-linguistic difference can lead to the transfer of grammatical properties across languages during…

Children exhibit a self-relevance effect whereby they share more candies with close friends and acquaintances than with strangers. The present study aimed to reduce the negative consequences of self-relevance effects by enhancing the behavioural control of sharing behaviour. This study initiated two behavioural control levels to investigate…