Modeling Individual Differences in Children's Information Integration During Pragmatic Word Learning.

Pragmatics is foundational to language use and learning. Computational cognitive models have been successfully used to predict pragmatic phenomena in adults and children - on an aggregate level. It is unclear if they can be used to predict behavior on an individual level.

Infants differentiate between successful and failed communication in a false-belief context.

Communication is based on social interaction, that is, interlocutors sharing attention to the intentions that they communicate about. In this study, we asked whether infants are aware of the fact that for information to be transferred, both interlocutors need to be present and share attention. Using a violation-of-expectation paradigm created to test infants' understanding of others' false beliefs, we asked whether 18-month-olds (n = 84) understood that correcting an agent's false belief via communication requires that the agent discerns the verbal statement.

Socio-cognitive engagement (but not socioeconomic status) predicts preschool children's language and pragmatic abilities.

Parental socioeconomic status (SES) strongly influences children's language abilities but less is known about its influence on pragmatic abilities (e.g., inferring intentions from relevance implicatures).

Children understand communication intuitively, but indirect communication makes them think twice-Evidence from pupillometry and looking patterns.

Interpreting a speaker's communicative acts is a challenge children face permanently in everyday life. In doing so, they seem to understand direct communicative acts more easily than indirect communicative acts. The current study investigated which step in the processing of communicative acts might cause difficulties in understanding indirect communication.

Children's level of word knowledge predicts their exclusion of familiar objects as referents of novel words.

When children are learning a novel object label, they tend to exclude as possible referents familiar objects for which they already have a name. In the current study, we wanted to know if children would behave in this same way regardless of how well they knew the name of potential referent objects, specifically, whether they could only comprehend it or they could both comprehend and produce it. Sixty-six monolingual German-speaking 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children participated in two experimental sessions.

18-month-olds comprehend indirect communicative acts.

From soon after their first birthdays young children are able to make inferences from a communicator's referential act (e.g., pointing to a container) to her overall social goal for communication (e.

3-year-old children make relevance inferences in indirect verbal communication.

Three studies investigated 3-year-old children's ability to determine a speaker's communicative intent when the speaker's overt utterance related to that intent only indirectly. Studies 1 and 2 examined children's comprehension of indirectly stated requests (e.g.

Immunohistological studies on clinically silent pituitary adenomas.

Clinically inactive adenomas represent 30.7% of all pituitary tumors in our surgical collection of 616 cases. Ninety-six tumors were studied immunohistologically with many antibodies for their hormone content.