In this study, Limburgian and Dutch 2.5- to 4-year-olds and adults took part in a word learning experiment. Following the procedure employed by Quam and Swingley (2010) and Singh et al. (2014), participants learned two novel word-object mappings. After training, word recognition was tested in correct pronunciation (CP) trials and mispronunciation (MP) trials featuring a pitch change. Since Limb...

Recent findings suggest that development changes the ability to comprehend degraded speech. Preschool children showed greater difficulties perceiving noise-vocoded speech (a signal that integrates amplitude over broad frequency bands) than sine-wave speech (which maintains the spectral peaks without the spectrum envelope). In contrast, 27-month-old children in the present study could recognize ...

During their third year of life, toddlers become increasingly skillful at coordinating their actions with peer partners and they form joint commitments in collaborative situations. However, little effort has been made to explain interindividual differences in collaboration among toddlers. Therefore, we examined the relative influence of distinct individual, dyadic, and social factors on toddler...

When tested with traditional false-belief tasks, which require answering a standard question about the likely behavior of an agent with a false belief, children perform below chance until age 4 y or later. When tested without such questions, however, children give evidence of false-belief understanding much earlier. Are traditional tasks difficult because they tap a more advanced form of false-...

Previous research showed that infants and toddlers are inclined to help prosocial agents and assign a positive valence to fair distributions. Also, they expect that positive and negative actions directed toward distributors will conform to reciprocity principles. This study investigates whether toddlers are selective in helping others, as a function of others' previous distributive actions. Tod...

Young children are extremely motivated to help others, but it is not clear whether they do so in anonymous situations without social recognition. In two studies, we found that 18month-old toddlers provided help equally in situations where an adult recipient was present and in situations where an adult recipient was not present. We included several control conditions to rule out that toddlers we...

When they see a familiar object and an unfamiliar one, and are asked to select the referent of a novel label, children usually choose the unfamiliar object. We asked whether this 'disambiguation effect' reflects an expectation that each object has just one label (mutual exclusivity), or an expectation about the intent of the speaker who uses a novel label. In Study 1, when a speaker gazed at or...