We propose a simple computational model that describes potential mechanisms underlying the organization and development of the lexical-semantic system in 18-month-old infants. We focus on two independent aspects: (i) on potential mechanisms underlying the development of taxonomic and associative priming, and (ii) on potential mechanisms underlying…

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…

Purpose: Phonological skills have been associated with developmental stuttering. The current study aimed to determine whether the neural processes underlying phonology, specifically for nonword rhyming, differentiated stuttering persistence and recovery. Method: Twenty-six children who stutter (CWS) and 18 children who do not stutter, aged 5…

How do infants select and use information that is relevant to the task at hand? Infants treat events that involve different spatial relations as distinct, and their selection and use of object information depends on the type of event they encounter. For example, 4.5-month-olds consider information about object height in occlusion events, but…

A hierarchical progression in infants' ability to use surface features, such as color, as a basis for object individuation in the first year has been well established (Tremoulet, Leslie, & Hall, 2000; Wilcox, 1999). There is evidence, however, that infants' sensitivity to surface features can be increased through multisensory (i.e.,…

Most children under 7 years of age presented with 10 daisies and 2 roses fail to indicate that there are more flowers than daisies. Instead of the appropriate comparison of the relative numerosities of the superordinate class (flowers) to its subordinate class (daisies), they perform a direct perceptual comparison of the extensions of the 2…

Structural priming paradigms have been influential in shaping theories of adult sentence processing and theories of syntactic development. However, until recently there have been few attempts to provide an integrated account that explains both adult and developmental data. The aim of the present paper was to begin the process of integration by…

We investigated whether success in number-conservation and class-inclusion tasks relies on a general ability to inhibit misleading strategies. Two groups of 10-year-olds performed inter-task priming between computerized versions of class-inclusion and number-conservation tasks (Experiment 1). In one group, the class-inclusion task served as a…

Learning through repetition is a fundamental form and also an effective method of language learning critical for achieving proficient and automatic language use. Massive repetition priming as a common research paradigm taps into the dynamic processes involved in repetition learning. Research with this paradigm has so far used only emotionally…

The relation between the maturation of brain mechanisms responsible for the N400 elicitation in the event-related brain potential (ERP) and the development of behavioral language skills was investigated in 12-month-old infants. ERPs to words presented in a picture-word priming paradigm were analyzed according to the infants' production and…

Repetition priming refers to the facilitation of stimulus processing due to prior processing of the same or similar stimulus, and is one of the most primitive ways in which experience and practice can affect performance. Previous studies have produced contradictory results regarding the stability of repetition priming across development. Drawing…

The authors provide evidence that long-term memory encoding can occur for briefly viewed objects in a rapid serial visual presentation list, contrary to claims that the brief presentation and quick succession of objects prevent encoding by disrupting a memory consolidation process that requires hundreds of milliseconds of uninterrupted processing.…

Two experiments explored the existence and the development of relations between action representations and object representations. A priming paradigm was used in which participants viewed an action pantomime followed by the picture of a tool, the tool being either associated or unassociated with the preceding action. Overall, we observed that the…

Research on deductive reasoning in adolescents and adults has shown that errors in deductive logic are not necessarily due to a lack of logical ability but can stem from an executive failure to inhibit biases. Few studies have examined this dissociation in children. Here, we used a negative priming paradigm with 64 children (8-10 years old) to…