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Children learn what words mean from hearing words used across a variety of contexts. Understanding how different contextual distributions relate to the words young children say is critical because context robustly affects basic learning and memory processes. This study examined children's everyday experiences using naturalistic video recordings to examine two contextual factors-where words are spoken and who speaks the words-through analyzing the nouns in language input and children's own language productions. The families in the study (n = 8) were two-parent, dual-income, middle-class families with a child between 1 year, 3 months to 4 years, 4 months (age

Word learning is a crucial aspect of early social and cognitive development, and previous research indicates that children’s word learning is influenced by the context in which the word is spoken. However, the role of emotions as contextual cues to word learning remains less clear. The present study investigated word learning among 2.5-year-old children in angry, happy, sad, and variable emotional contexts. Fifty-six children (30 female; Mean age=2.49 years) participated in a novel noun generalization task in which children observed an experimenter labeling objects in either a consistently angry, consistently happy, consistently sad, or variable (one exemplar per emotion) context. Children were then asked to identify the label-object association. Results revealed that children’s performance was above chance levels for all four conditions (all t’s>3.68, all p’s

Although linguistic and nonlinguistic cues help young children infer meaning when presented with unfamiliar words, little is known about how syntactic information and early bilingual experience shape word learning. This study examined how monolingual and bilingual 24- to 30-month-olds' disambiguation of novel words during a mutual exclusivity task differs as a function of syntactic cues, age, and productive vocabulary. English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals were presented with familiar and novel objects within a syntactic context (e.g., "Give me the blick!") or in isolation (e.g., "Blick!"). Results showed that monolinguals and bilinguals adhered to mutual exclusivity more often when provided with syntactic cues than when those cues were absent. Furthermore, bilinguals' mutually exclusive disambiguation of novel words increased with age, but only when syntactic cues were available. These results provide insight into factors that influence children's disambiguation of novel words. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

Children learn the abstract, challenging categories of emotions from young ages, and it has recently been suggested that language (and more specifically emotion words) may aid this learning. To examine the language that young children hear and produce as they’re learning emotion categories, the present study examined nearly 2,000 transcripts from 179 children ranging from 15- to 47-months from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). Results provide key descriptive, developmental, and predictive information regarding child emotion language production, including the finding that child emotion word production was predicted by mothers’ emotion word production (β=.21, p

As children learn words, they develop attentional biases that support word learning but are hard to overcome. Predictive contextual cues may help increase attention to non-biased, or overlooked, features. This study sought to direct 3-year-old children’s attention to texture, a feature typically overlooked when categorizing new words early in development. During training, half of the children learned novel shape (a biased feature) and texture (an overlooked feature) categories with predictive cues, and half of the children learned the same categories with non-predictive cues. Children were then tested in a categorization task with novel texture words. The cues were present at test in Experiment 1 (N = 63) and absent in Experiment 2 (N = 37). Children in the predictive cue condition consistently chose the texture match more often than children in the non-predictive cue condition. These results inform our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that may contribute to word learning.

Young children discover the meaning of words from hearing words used across time and across contexts. Children learn to label not only the specific instances they have experienced, but they also learn the meaning of words appropriately to new instances. Moreover, children remember these word-referent pairs across a period of time, such that they are able to recall the appropriate word after delays of days or weeks. In this chapter, we address these aspects of word learning – how do children generalize instances to new situations and remember word-referent pairs across time? In doing so, we discuss statistical learning as a mechanism for word learning with a specific focus on the processes of aggregation and abstraction. Second, we discuss how multiple examples dynamically support the retention of word-referent pairs.

Number-related language input has been shown to influence children's number word acquisition and mathematical ability. Significant differences exist between how Mandarin Chinese speaking parents and monolingual English-speaking parents use numeric language in speech to children. In particular, Mandarin Chinese speaking parents use cardinal number much more frequently in speech to children than do English speaking parents. However, because previous studies have been conducted cross-nationally, research has been unable to disentangle the influences of language from parental influence. The current study examined numeric language input to preschool children with bilingual Mandarin-English American parents. Results show that when parents speak to their children in Mandarin Chinese, children hear more instances and examples of the cardinal number principle than when parents speak to their children in English. This suggests that differences between how the Mandarin Chinese and English languages are structured leads to disparities in how frequently children hear cardinal number in everyday speech.

A large body of research indicates that children can map words to categories and generalize the label to new instances of the category after hearing a single instance of the category labeled. Additional research demonstrates that word learning is enhanced when children are presented with multiple instances of a category through comparison or contrast. In this study, 3-year-old children participated in a novel noun generalization task in which a label was given for either (a) a single instance of a category, (b) multiple instances of a category, or (c) contrasting a category instance with non-category members. Children were asked to extend the label to a new category at test either immediately (Study 1) or after a 10-s delay (Study 2). The results indicate that when tested immediately, children who heard a single instance labeled outperformed children who were presented with multiple instances. However, when tested after a brief delay, there was no difference among the conditions.

Children prefer to learn from people who are like themselves. However, who is considered "like themselves" is complex for bilingual children. Thus, the current study examined whether children's language experiences affect who they prefer to imitate. A sample of 3- to 5-year-old monolingual English-speaking children (n=16), Japanese-English bilingual children (n=16), and children bilingual in English and a non-Japanese language (n=16) watched videos of a monolingual English speaker and a Japanese-English bilingual speaker playing with novel toys and were asked to play with the same novel toys. Although all children--regardless of language background--imitated the monolingual speaker at similar rates, the two bilingual groups imitated the bilingual speaker more often than did the monolingual children. Such results suggest that experience in speaking two languages affects children's imitation behaviors.

Although many executive function (EF) tasks require only nonverbal responses, the language used by experimenters to explain the task may be important for young children's EF task performance. This study investigated how the vocabulary used in explaining an EF task affects 2-year-olds' performance. Experiment 1 used the standard instructions for the Reverse Categorization Task, in which children are asked to sort different-sized blocks into different-sized buckets according to one rule and then switch to a new rule. In Experiment 2, the task remained the same, but different instructions requiring less knowledge of size words were used. Children's productive vocabulary was assessed in both experiments but was only correlated with task performance in Experiment 1. These results suggest that task-specific vocabulary knowledge may play a role in children's performance on tasks designed to measure nonverbal cognitive ability.

In Japanese, numeral classifiers-or measure words-co-occur with numbers in counting phrases. Th e present study characterized parent numeral classifier use and its relation to children’s classifier acquisition and number learning. Twenty-four Japanese-speaking parents and their two- to six-year-old children viewed and talked about two wordless picture books about counting to each other. Children also participated in a Counting task and Give-N task. Results revealed (1) parents’ classifier use changed in relation to children’s age and classifier use, and (2) parents’ increased use of specific classifiers was uniquely associated with children’s number understanding. These results suggest that aspects of children’s language and numerical development are related to parents’ language input, demonstrating the importance of examining the relation between language and cognition in a developmental context.

Summary: The spacing effect refers to the robust finding that long-term memory is promoted when learning events are distributed in time rather than massed in immediate succession. The current study extended research on the spacing effect by examining whether spaced learning schedules can simultaneously promote multiple forms of learning, such as memory and generalization, in the context of an educational intervention. Thirty-six early elementary school-aged children were presented with science lessons on one of three schedules: massed, clumped, and spaced. At a 1-week delayed test, children in the spaced condition demonstrated improvements in both memory and generalization, significantly outperforming children in the other conditions. However, there was no observed relationship between children’s memory performance and generalization performance. The current study highlights directions for future research and contributes to a growing body of work demonstrating the benefits of spaced learning for educational curriculum. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. A long history of research on human memory has sought to identify the conditions of the learning environment that promote the ability to retain information. A central finding from this work is that the timing of learning events may be central in supporting memory. The most robust and highly replicable observed timing phenomenon is often termed the ‘spacing effect’ (dating back to Ebbinghaus, 1885/1964). The current study sought to extend research on the spacing effect by (i) grounding our investigation in an educational intervention in order to further bridge psychological science and educational practices and (ii) examining if and how spaced learning schedules simultaneously support multiple forms of learning, such as memory and generalization, within the context of an educational intervention.

Children have a difficult time in generalizing among changes in background context. We examined the role of two processes that may aid in generalizing category labels in new contexts. In this study, 2-year-old children were taught novel object categories in one type of contextual condition and were tested for category generalization in a new context. In Experiment 1, children ( N = 48) learned in one of three conditions: (a) all category instances presented in the same context, (b) all category instances presented in varied contexts, or (c) some category instances presented in the same context and some presented in varied contexts. In Experiment 2, children ( N = 48) learned in one of three conditions, all of which included presentations in the same context and varied contexts but differed in order. Results from both experiments revealed that children were significantly more likely to choose the correct object when training was in both same and varied contexts regardless of order. The results suggest that contextual factors, by providing both support for aggregation and support for decontextualization, contribute to word learning and generalization for novice word learners.

The spacing effect refers to increased retention following learning instances that are spaced out in time compared with massed together in time. By one account, the advantages of spaced learning should be independent of task particulars and previous learning experiences given that spacing effects have been demonstrated in a variety of tasks across the lifespan. However, by another account, spaced learning should be affected by previous learning because past learning affects the memory and attention processes that form the crux of the spacing effect. The current study investigated whether individuals' learning histories affect the role of spacing in category learning. We examined the effect of spacing on 24 2- to 3.5-year-old children's learning of categories organized by properties to which children's previous learning experiences have biased them to attend (i.e., shape) and properties to which children are less biased to attend (i.e., texture and color). Spaced presentations led to significantly better learning of shape categories, but not of texture or color categories, compared with massed presentations. In addition, generalized estimating equations analyses revealed positive relations between the size of children's "shape-side" productive vocabularies and their shape category learning and between the size of children's "against-the-system" productive vocabularies and their texture category learning. These results suggest that children's attention to and memory for novel object categories are strongly related to their individual word-learning histories. Moreover, children's learned attentional biases affected the types of categories for which spacing facilitated learning. These findings highlight the importance of considering how learners' previous experiences may influence future learning.

We examined how spatial language affected search behavior in a landmark spatial search task. In Experiment 1, two- to six-year-old children were trained to find a toy in the center of a square array of four identical landmarks. Children heard one of three spatial language cues once during the initial training trial (“here,” “in the middle,” “next to this one”). After search performance reached criterion, children received a probe test trial in which the landmark array was expanded. In Experiment 2, two- to four-year-old children participated in the search task and also completed a language comprehension task. Results revealed that children’s spatial language comprehension scores and spatial language cues heard during training trials were related to children’s performance in the search task.

A large literature has documented that comparison and contrast lead to better performance in a variety of tasks. However, studies of comparison and contrast present contradictory conclusions as to when and how these processes benefit learners. Across four studies, we examined how the specifics of the comparison and contrast task affect performance by systematically manipulating the feature variation and category structure in a category extension task performed by 3-year-old and 4-year-old children. Studies 1 (n = 48, M = 42.6 months) and 2 (n = 48, M = 42. 4 months) investigated comparison and contrast with high-density categories. Studies 3A (n = 60, M = 43.47 months), 3B (n = 48, M = 53. 2 months) and 4 (n = 48, M = 53.7 months) investigated comparison and contrast with low-density categories. Results indicated both category structure and feature variation affect the efficacy of comparison and contrast. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The spacing effect describes the robust finding that long-term learning is promoted when learning events are spaced out in time rather than presented in immediate succession. Studies of the spacing effect have focused on memory processes rather than for other types of learning, such as the acquisition and generalization of new concepts. In this study, early elementary school children (5- to 7-year-olds; N = 36) were presented with science lessons on 1 of 3 schedules: massed, clumped, and spaced. The results revealed that spacing lessons out in time resulted in higher generalization performance for both simple and complex concepts. Spaced learning schedules promote several types of learning, strengthening the implications of the spacing effect for educational practices and curriculum.

Due to the central role of categorization and generalization in cognition, a considerable amount of research has examined the factors that promote generalization. One particular factor that has been shown to facilitate generalization is the timing with which instances of a category are presented. The findings of this research present a paradoxical set of results—both presenting instances at the same time, providing an opportunity to compare instances simultaneously, and presenting instances apart in time, by spacing the presentation of instances out in time, have been shown to facilitate generalization. In this study, we examine these findings by investigating how simultaneous, massed, and spaced learning schedules affect children’s in-the-moment and long-term generalization. Moreover, we identify a mechanism, ease of retrieval during learning, which may contribute to differences in performance across time.

Despite dramatically narrowing gender gaps, women remain underrepresented in mathematics and math-related fields. Parents can shape expectations and interests, which may predict later differences in achievement and occupational choices. This study examines children’s early mathematical environments by observing the amount that mothers talk to their sons and daughters (mean age 22 months) about cardinal number, a basic precursor to mathematics. In analyses of naturalistic mother–child interactions from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) database, boys received significantly more number-specific language input than girls. Greater amounts of early number-related talk may promote familiarity and liking for mathematical concepts, which may influence later preferences and career choices. Additionally, the stereotype of male dominance in math may be so pervasive that culturally prescribed gender roles may be unintentionally reinforced to very young children.

The present study examined the number-specific parental language input to Mandarin- and English-speaking preschool-aged children. Mandarin and English transcripts from the CHILDES database were examined for amount of numeric speech, specific types of numeric speech and syntactic frames in which numeric speech appeared. The results showed that Mandarin-speaking parents talked about number more frequently than English-speaking parents. Further, the ways in which parents talked about number terms in the two languages was more supportive of a cardinal interpretation in Mandarin than in English. We discuss these results in terms of their implications for numerical understanding and later mathematical performance.

The spacing effect describes the robust phenomenon whereby memory is enhanced when learning events are distributed, instead of being presented in succession. We investigated the effect of spacing on children's memory and category induction. Three-year-old children were presented with two tasks, a memory task and a category induction task. In the memory task, identical instances of an object were presented and then tested in a multiple choice test. In the category induction task, different instances of a category were presented and tested in a multiple choice test. In both tasks, presenting the instances in a spaced sequence resulted in more learning than presenting the instances in a massed sequence, despite the difficulty created by the spaced sequence. The spaced sequence increased the difficulty of the task by allowing children time to forget the previous instance during the spaced interval.

Two studies, an experimental category learning task and a computational simulation, examined how sequencing training instances to maximize comparison and memory affects category learning. In Study 1, 2-year-old children learned color categories with three training conditions that varied in how categories were distributed throughout training and how similarity between exemplars progressed across instances. The results indicate that beginning learning by interacting with a limited set of highly similar exemplars leads to more learning than when the instances are distributed and dissimilar. In Study 2, order effects were examined with a symbolic connectionist model of general learning and representation discovery (DORA). The results of the studies suggest that when the presentation of instances is ordered in such a way that discrete instances of a category can be more readily connected in memory, category learning and discovery are more likely to occur.