With development knowledge becomes organized according to semantic links, including early-developing associative (e.g., juicy-apple) and gradually developing taxonomic links (e.g., apple-pear). Word co-occurrence regularities may foster these links: Associative links may form from direct co-occurrence (e.g., juicy-apple), and taxonomic links from…

Language is the basis of human communication and is the most important key to complete mental development and thinking. Therefore, children must learn to communicate using appropriate language. For this to happen, the development of language in the child must be understood as a biological process, complete with internal laws and with marked stages…

Infancy is a period of significant change for both the brain and behavior. During the first two years of life, the brain experiences an explosion of synaptic connections and myelination, alongside rapid development in motor, linguistic, and social behavioral abilities. Understanding the relationship between brain development and behavioral…

During human childhood, brain development and body growth compete for limited metabolic resources, resulting in a trade-off where energy allocated to brain development can decrease as body growth accelerates. This preregistered study explores the relationship between language skills, serving as a proxy for brain development, and body mass index at…

This paper, conceptual but with empirical support, fills in some blanks in Vygotsky's reworking of Spinoza's "Ethics." Here Vygotsky sought to develop a developmental theory of emotions that would fit his developmental theory of higher psychological functions; that is, one which used function to explain how structure changes (much as…

Despite earlier claims that language abilities are intact in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS), many studies have shown that language development is often delayed and atypical, that is, it develops in line with different cognitive abilities compared to typically developing populations. It is unclear, however, whether general cognitive…

Emotion words allow us to identify, describe and regulate our emotional states. Emotion vocabulary grows through childhood, but little research has considered emotion words in the context of children's written language. To address this gap, we used a cross-corpus developmental approach to chart the emergence of emotion words in children's reading…

The goal of this intensive longitudinal study was to trace the developmental trajectories of infant pointing production, through consideration of the modality (i.e. pointing alone vs pointing-vocal coupling) and the communicative intention (i.e. imperative vs declarative). Multilevel analysis was used to model the normative trend and the…

Shared intentionality theory posits that at age 3, children expand their conception of plural agency to include 3- or more-person groups. We sought to determine whether this conceptual shift is detectable in children's pronoun use. We report the results of a series of Bayesian hierarchical generative models fitted to 479 English-speaking…

The study examines phases in developing specification of grammatical marking of emergent clause-combining (CC) as indicative of children's growing ability to integrate two or more independent predications. To this end, both intra- and inter-clausal analyses were applied to all CC utterances produced by three Hebrew-acquiring children aged 2;0-3;0,…

A grandmother attempts to teach her four-year-old granddaughter the multiplication tables using simple repetition, but they repeatedly start over at 'three fives'; the child keeps coming up with 'thirty-five'. We consider three possible explanations: self-perpetuating frequency of behavior, saliency of memory and Vygotsky's next or proximal zones…

This paper examines the acquisition of demonstratives (e.g., "that," "there") from a cross-linguistic perspective. Although demonstratives are often said to play a crucial role in L1 acquisition, there is little systematic research on this topic. Using extensive corpus data of spontaneous child speech, the paper investigates…

Background: The emergence of language in the early years is a major developmental accomplishment that underpins learning, enables social interaction and, later, is an indicator of well-being. Learning language is an effortless process for most, but can be challenging for others. There is a need to act early. First, because there are several…

Children seem to be relatively delayed in their comprehension of the verbal "be"-passive in English, compared to their acquisition of other constructions of object-movement such as "wh"-questions and unaccusatives. Prior work has found that children's performance on these passives can be affected by the verb's lexical…

As a spoken word unfolds over time, similar sounding words ("cap" and "cat") compete until one word "wins". Lexical competition becomes more efficient from infancy through adolescence. We examined one potential mechanism underlying this development: lexical inhibition, by which activated candidates suppress…