Looking beyond person-specific cues indicative of credibility: Reward rules and executive function predict preschoolers' acceptance of (un)reliable assertions.

We tested whether 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 88) can deduce individuals' credibility exclusively from situational cues such as game rules that reward competitive or cooperative behavior-and whether children's inferences are predicted by their executive function (EF) and theory of mind (ToM) skills. When presented with the game rules, children endorsed a partner's claims more often if the rules incentivized cooperation between participants and partners (e.g.

Children's explicit assessments of reliability influence their willingness to learn novel labels.

This study examined how explicitly evaluating another person's performance influences 3.5-year-old children's willingness to learn from that person. Children interacted with a speaker who presented a series of familiar objects and labeled them either accurately or inaccurately.

Playing by the rules: self-interest information influences children's trust and trustworthiness in the absence of feedback.

This study documented how children's decisions to trust and help partners in a game depend on the game's incentives. Adults, 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds (N=128) guessed the location of hidden prizes, assisted by a partner who observed the hiding. After each hiding event the partner shared information with participants about the prize's location.

Developmental differences in the relative weighing of informants' social attributes.

We examined whether similarity, familiarity, and reliability cues guide children's learning and whether these cues are weighed differently with age. Three- to 5-year-olds (n = 184) met 2 informant puppets, 1 of which was similar (Experiment 1) or familiar (Experiment 2) to the participants. Initially, children's preference for either informant was measured.

The influence of speaker reliability on first versus second label learning.

Children's confidence in their own knowledge may influence their willingness to learn novel information from others. Twenty-four-month-old children's (N = 160) willingness to learn novel labels for either familiar or novel objects from an adult speaker was tested in 1 of 5 conditions: accurate, inaccurate, knowledgeable, ignorant, or uninformative. Children were willing to learn a second label for an object from a reliable informant in the accurate, knowledgeable, and uninformative conditions; children were less willing to apply a novel label to a familiar object if the speaker previously was inaccurate or had expressed ignorance.

Structural priming as structure-mapping: children use analogies from previous utterances to guide sentence production.

What mechanisms underlie children's language production? Structural priming--the repetition of sentence structure across utterances--is an important measure of the developing production system. We propose its mechanism in children is the same as may underlie analogical reasoning: structure-mapping. Under this view, structural priming is the result of making an analogy between utterances, such that children map semantic and syntactic structure from previous to future utterances.

Infants' understanding of false labeling events: the referential roles of words and the speakers who use them.

The four studies reported here examine whether 16-month-old infants' responses to true and false utterances interact with their knowledge of human agents. In Study 1, infants heard repeated instances either of true or false labeling of common objects; labels came from an active human speaker seated next to the infant. In Study 2, infants experienced the same stimuli and procedure; however, we replaced the human speaker of Study 1 with an audio speaker in the same location.