Preschoolers Use Emotion in Speech to Learn New Words

How Infants Use the Words They Know to Learn New Words

Napping helps preschoolers learn.

A great deal of research supports the claim that sleep benefits cognitive function in adults. However, evidence-based research on how much sleep children need for healthy cognitive development is scarce. Despite this lack of clarity, certain facts appear consistent across studies. First, recommendations for sleep need have fluctuated throughout history, with children always sleeping less than t...

Preschoolers prefer to learn causal information

Young children, in general, appear to have a strong drive to explore the environment in ways that reveal its underlying causal structure. But are they really attuned specifically to casual information in this quest for understanding, or do they show equal interest in other types of non-obvious information about the world? To answer this question, we introduced 20 three-year-old children to two ...

Two-year-olds use primary sentence accent to learn new words.

German children aged 2;1 heard a sentence containing a nonce noun and a nonce verb (Der Feks miekt). Either the noun or the verb was prosodically highlighted by increased pitch, duration and loudness. Independently, either the object or the action in the ongoing referential scene was the new element in the situation. Children learned the nonce noun only when it was both highlighted prosodically...

Children Use Non-Verbal Cues to Learn New Words From Robots as well as People

Social robots are innovative new technologies that have considerable potential to support children’s education as tutors and learning companions. Given this potential, it behooves us to study the mechanisms by which children learn from social robots, as well as the similarities and differences between children’s learning from robots as compared to human partners. In the present study, we examin...