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Children can represent events in our everyday life in both non-linguistic and linguistic formats. We aimed to investigate whether non-linguistic representations are changed once children acquire their linguistic counterparts. In the present study, we explored whether and how language changes the perception of simple means-end actions using an eye-tracking paradigm. Children between 12 and 24 months of age heard a sentence containing a verb and subsequently watched an action video. Results show an interfering influence of language on action perception at 12 months and a facilitating influence at 24 months. However, this was only the case for verbs that are already in the toddlers' productive vocabulary but not for those that are acquired later. Taken together, the results suggest that a communication between non-linguistic and linguistic representations starts early and develops in the second year of life. The successful facilitatory influence depends on the productive repertoire of the language in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we asked whether 14- and 18-month-old infants use the experiences they have previously shared with others when deciding what to point to for them declaratively. After sharing a particular type of referent with an adult in an excited manner, 18-month-olds subsequently found a picture of that type of referent more worthy of declarative pointing than some other picture-but only for that adult, not for a different adult. Mixed results were found with 14-month-olds. We thus show that by 18 months, infants accurately track their shared experiences with specific individuals and use this to make communicative decisions. These results also demonstrate that infants sometimes use declarative pointing to indicate not totally 'new' things, as in the classic formulation, but things which are 'old' in the sense that 'we' should recognize them as similar to something we have previously shared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies suggest that even infants attend to others' beliefs in order to make sense of their behavior. To warrant the assumption of early belief understanding, corresponding competences need to be demonstrated in a variety of different belief-inducing situations. The present study provides corresponding evidence, using a completely nonverbal object-transfer task based on the general violation-of-expectation paradigm. A total of n = 36 infants (15-month-olds) participated in one of three conditions. Infants saw an actor who either observed an object's location change, did not observe it, or performed the location change manually without seeing it (i.e., variations in the actor's information access). Results are in accordance with the assumption that 15-month-old infants master different belief-inducing situations in a highly flexible way, accepting visual as well as manual information access as a proper basis for belief induction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]