Bigger versus smaller: Children's understanding of size comparison words becomes more precise with age.

The ability to compare plays a key role in how humans learn, but words that describe relations between objects, like comparisons, are difficult to learn. We examined how children learn size comparison words, and how their interpretations of these change across development. One-hundred-and-forty children in England (36-107 months; 68 girls; majority White) were asked to build block structures that were bigger, longer, smaller, shorter, or taller than an experimenter's.

Newborns are sensitive to multiple cues for word segmentation in continuous speech.

Before infants can learn words, they must identify those words in continuous speech. Yet, the speech signal lacks obvious boundary markers, which poses a potential problem for language acquisition (Swingley, Philos Trans R Soc Lond. Series B, Biol Sci 364(1536), 3617-3632, 2009).

measure of neonate brain optical properties and hemodynamic parameters by time-domain near-infrared spectroscopy.

By exploiting a multichannel portable instrument for time-domain near-infrared spectroscopy (TD-NIRS), we characterized healthy neonates' brains in term of optical properties and hemodynamic parameters. In particular, we assessed the absolute values of the absorption and reduced scattering coefficients at two wavelengths, together with oxy-, deoxy- and total hemoglobin concentrations, and the blood oxygen saturation of the neonates' brains. In this study, 33 healthy full-term neonates were tested, obtaining the following median values: 0.

Five-Month-Old Infants Have General Knowledge of How Nonsolid Substances Behave and Interact.

Experience puts people in touch with nonsolid substances, such as water, blood, and milk, which are crucial to survival. People must be able to understand the behavior of these substances and to differentiate their properties from those of solid objects. We investigated whether infants represent nonsolid substances as a conceptual category distinct from solid objects on the basis of differences in cohesiveness.

On the edge of language acquisition: inherent constraints on encoding multisyllabic sequences in the neonate brain.

To understand language, humans must encode information from rapid, sequential streams of syllables - tracking their order and organizing them into words, phrases, and sentences. We used Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) to determine whether human neonates are born with the capacity to track the positions of syllables in multisyllabic sequences. After familiarization with a six-syllable sequence, the neonate brain responded to the change (as shown by an increase in oxy-hemoglobin) when the two edge syllables switched positions but not when two middle syllables switched positions (Experiment 1), indicating that they encoded the syllables at the edges of sequences better than those in the middle.

Prelinguistic Relational Concepts: Investigating Analogical Processing in Infants.

This research asks whether analogical processing ability is present in human infants, using the simplest and most basic relation-the same-different relation. Experiment 1 (N = 26) tested whether 7- and 9-month-olds spontaneously detect and generalize these relations from a single example, as previous research has suggested. The attempted replication failed.

Nonhuman primate vocalizations support categorization in very young human infants.

Language is a signature of our species and our primary conduit for conveying the contents of our minds. The power of language derives not only from the exquisite detail of the signal itself but also from its intricate link to human cognition. To acquire a language, infants must identify which signals are part of their language and discover how these signals are linked to meaning.

Categorization in 3- and 4-month-old infants: an advantage of words over tones.

Neonates prefer human speech to other nonlinguistic auditory stimuli. However, it remains an open question whether there are any conceptual consequences of words on object categorization in infants younger than 6 months. The current study examined the influence of words and tones on object categorization in forty-six 3- to 4-month-old infants.

Five-month-old infants have different expectations for solids and liquids.

Many studies have established that 2-month-old infants have knowledge of solid objects' basic physical properties. Evidence about infants' understanding of nonsolid substances, however, is relatively sparse and equivocal. We present two experiments demonstrating that 5-month-old infants have distinct expectations for how solids and liquids behave.