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Work by Flavell, Beach, and Chinsky indicated a change in the spontaneous production of overt verbalization behaviors when comparing young children (age 5) with older children (age 10). Despite the critical role that this evidence of a change in verbalization behaviors plays in modern theories of cognitive development and working memory, there has been only one other published near replication of this work. In this Registered Replication Report, we relied on researchers from 17 labs who contributed their results to a larger and more comprehensive sample of children. We assessed memory performance and the presence or absence of verbalization behaviors of young children at different ages and determined that the original pattern of findings was largely upheld: Older children were more likely to verbalize, and their memory spans improved. We confirmed that 5- and 6-year-old children who verbalized recalled more than children who did not verbalize. However, unlike Flavell et al., substantial proportions of our 5- and 6-year-old samples overtly verbalized at least sometimes during the picture memory task. In addition, continuous increase in overt verbalization from 7 to 10 years old was not consistently evident in our samples. These robust findings should be weighed when considering theories of cognitive development, particularly theories concerning when verbal rehearsal emerges and relations between speech and memory.

Children frequently apply a novel label to a novel object, a behavior known as the mutual exclusivity bias (MEB). This study examined how MEB affects children’s retention for word mappings. In Experiment 1, preschoolers (N = 39; Mage = 46.62 months) and adults (N = 24; Mage = 21.63 years) completed an immediate word mapping task and a delayed retention test. Both samples used MEB during referent selection, but neither group displayed higher retention for words mapped via MEB than words mapped via other referent selection strategies at test. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 with preschoolers (N = 85; Mage = 47.78 months) and provided evidence against the possibility that interference from multiple words contributed to children’s faster forgetting of word mappings when using MEB. Experiment 3 presented children (N = 30; Mage = 51.13 months) with an abbreviated version of the task, providing evidence against the alternative hypothesis that cognitive load during learning caused the forgetting observed in Experiments 1 and 2. Taken together, these experiments suggest that MEB supports initial word mapping but may not provide an advantage for long-term retention.

Learning new words is a difficult task. Children are able to resolve the ambiguity of the task and map words to referents by tracking co-occurrence probabilities across multiple moments in time, a behavior termed cross-situational word learning (CSWL). Although we observe developments in CSWL abilities across childhood, the cognitive processes that drive individual and developmental change have yet to be identified. This research tested a developmental systems account by examining whether multiple cognitive systems co-contribute to children’s CSWL. The results of two experiments revealed that multiple cognitive domains, such as memory and language abilities, are likely to drive the development of CSWL above and beyond children’s age. The results also revealed that memory abilities are likely to be particularly important above and beyond other cognitive abilities. These findings have implications for theories and computational models of CSWL, which typically do not account for individual children’s cognitive capacities or changes in cognitive capacities across time.

Adults modify the way they speak to children to support children’s learning across several domains. However, no previous research has studied whether adults change their language when explaining science to children. The current study examined if and how adults change the manner in which they talk about science when providing explanations to children vs. providing explanations to other adults. Participants (N = 81) were video recorded while explaining basic science concepts to children and adults. Recordings were later analyzed to determine if and how participants changed the quality and content of their explanations. The results confirmed that adults did change their explanations when talking to children about science by providing more potentially beneficial, but also disadvantageous, information. Participants perceived that they provided more accurate explanations to children, but appeared to be making metacognitive judgments largely based upon the changes made that could be beneficial to learning. Taken together, this work suggests that science may be a domain in which adults are not well equipped to modify and monitor their language to children.

The spacing effect is the robust finding that learners have stronger long-term memory for information presented on a spaced schedule, in which learning events are distributed across time, rather than a massed schedule, in which learning events are presented in immediate succession. Despite the fact that the spacing effect is highly replicable across tasks and timescales, most adults do not believe that spaced learning promotes memory. Instead, there is a persistent “massed bias”; adults believe that massed learning promotes memory to a greater degree than spaced learning. The developmental origins of the massed bias have yet to be studied; thus, the goals of the current research were to (a) identify a developmental period in which we do not observe a massed bias and (b) determine whether metamemory is related to the onset of the massed bias. The results revealed that children (aged 2–10 years; N = 109) do not have a persistent massed bias, and the number of massed endorsements increased across the early elementary school years. Children’s age predicted a massed bias, but individual differences in children’s metamemory abilities were not related to bias development when controlling for age. Taken together, this work suggests that researchers will need to reconceptualize dual-process theoretical accounts of metamemory and spaced learning to explain why and how children develop a massed bias.

Distributing learning events in time promotes memory to a greater degree than massing learning together in immediate succession, a phenomenon known as the spacing effect. In this article, I review research on the spacing effect in children's acquisition and generalization of conceptual knowledge. For decades, researchers hypothesized that spaced learning should deter generalization because the forgetting that occurs between learning events limits children's ability to retrieve prior learning. However, new research suggests that spaced learning promotes children's generalization and implicates forgetting as the mechanism that supports, rather than deters, children's generalization. This work counters the intuitive assumption that forgetting uniformly constrains children's learning, suggesting instead that forgetting is a domain-general process that promotes cognitive development.

The “shape bias” describes the phenomenon that, after a certain point in development, children and adults generalize object categories based on shape to a greater degree than other perceptual features. The focus of research on the shape bias has been to examine the types of information that learners attend to in one moment in time. The current work takes a different approach by examining whether learners’ categorical biases are related to their retention of information across time. In three experiments, children’s (N = 72) and adults’ (N = 240) memory performance for features of objects was examined in relation to their categorical biases. The results of these experiments demonstrated that the number of shape matches chosen during the shape bias task significantly predicted shape memory. Moreover, children and adults with a shape bias were more likely to remember the shape of objects than the color and size of objects. Taken together, this work suggests that the development of a shape bias may engender better memory for shape information.

In order to understand how generalization develops across the lifespan, researchers have examined the factors of the learning environment that promote the acquisition and generalization of categories. One such factor is the timing of learning events, which recent findings suggest may play a particularly important role in children's generalization. In the current study, we build upon these findings by examining the impact of equally spaced versus expanding learning schedules on children's ability to generalize from studied exemplars of a given category to new exemplars presented on a later test. We found no significant effects of learning schedule when the generalization test was administered immediately after the learning phase, but there was a clear difference when the generalization test was delayed by 24 hours: Children in the expanding condition significantly outperformed children in the equally spaced learning condition. These results suggest forgetting and retrieval dynamics may be lower-level cognitive mechanisms promoting generalization and have several implications for broad theories of learning, cognition, and development.