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Representations formed on the basis of verbal descriptions may be fleeting and relatively weak or robust enough to support identification of referents. We investigated these two possibilities. Children (2.5- and 3.5-year-olds) were read verbal descriptions of unusual animals and were asked to choose the described animal from a pair of items. Sometimes the features (prototypical color and prototypical location) were distinctive (only present for the target), and sometimes one feature was present for both animals (both were yellow or on leaves). Both age groups were best able to identify the described animal when the features were distinctive, and 3.5-year-olds identified the target when both color was distinctive and a delay was inserted between the description and test. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Specific language impairment (SLI) has traditionally been characterized as a deficit of structural language (specifically grammar), with relative strengths in pragmatics. In this study, comprehensive assessment of production, comprehension, and metalinguistic judgment of referring expressions revealed that children with SLI have weaknesses in both structural and pragmatic language skills relative to age-matched peers. Correlational analyses highlight a relationship between their performance on the experimental tasks and their structural language ability. Despite their poor performance on the production and comprehension tasks, children with SLI were able to recognize pragmatically under-informative reference relative to other types of utterance, although they imposed a less severe penalty on such expressions than typically developing peers, a pattern that supports the pragmatic tolerance account. Our novel methodology (which probed structural abilities from both the speaker’s and hearer’s perspectives as well as metalinguistic and pragmatic skills in the same sample) challenges the assumption that pragmatic errors stem from deficits in social cognition and instead supports recent findings suggesting that when the impact of structural language is isolated, pragmatic deficits may be resolved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Drawings can represent both Literal and Non-Literal referents. • Six-year-olds provide literal and non-literal labels for the same picture, showing flexibility. • Six-year-olds endorse non-literal meanings when these are triggered first. • Four-year-olds were rigid in their literal interpretations when verbally questioned. • When a game format was used, both age groups showed representational flexibility. Pictures can represent more than one entity, and they can also represent literal or nonliteral concepts associated with a referent. In two studies, we examined whether 4-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults can view pictures as both literal and nonliteral when they are presented with different contextual cues, which would indicate representational flexibility. In Study 1, children and adults were asked to name iconic pictures after hearing a story explaining how a fictional character had created or used a picture in, for instance, a literal context (e.g., a girl used a picture of a crown to represent what she wanted for Christmas) and a second story on how the same artist produced or used an identical picture in a nonliteral context (e.g., the same girl used the picture of a crown to represent what she wanted to be when she grew up). After each story, the picture was shown and participants were asked "What does this mean?" The 6-year-olds and adults, but not the 4-year-olds, showed representational flexibility in their interpretations of pictures across contexts. Study 2 provided evidence of flexible pictorial interpretations, even for the younger age group, when children were presented with a game in which they were asked to select a suitable picture to represent a nonliteral referent. Taken together, our results suggest that the conditions under which representational flexibility is elicited influence the developmental progression observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article explores young infants’ ability to learn new words in situations providing tightly controlled social and salience cues to their reference. Four experiments investigated whether, given two potential referents, 15-month-olds would attach novel labels to (a) an image toward which a digital recording of a face turned and gazed, (b) a moving image versus a stationary image, (c) a moving image toward which the face gazed, and (d) a gazed-on image versus a moving image. Infants successfully used the recorded gaze cue to form new word–referent associations and also showed learning in the salience condition. However, their behavior in the salience condition and in the experiments that followed suggests that, rather than basing their judgments of the words’ reference on the mere presence or absence of the referent’s motion, infants were strongly biased to attend to the consistency with which potential referents moved when a word was heard. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]