Monolingual and bilingual children's performance on arithmetic fluency varies by language fluency.

Research has demonstrated that learning two or more languages during development (i.e., becoming bilingual) shapes children's cognition in myriad ways. However, because such studies have largely been conducted using laboratory experiments, it is unclear how bilingualism may modulate more naturalistic cognitive skills such as arithmetic fluency. Moreover, how the relationship between speaking two (or more) languages and arithmetic varies with language fluency-specifically, the degree of bilingualism-has been understudied. Therefore, this study examined third- to fifth-grade monolingual (n = 70) and bilingual (n = 51) children's performance on an arithmetic fluency task. Monolinguals' and bilinguals' performance on the arithmetic fluency task did not differ. However, individual differences in the relation between children's arithmetic fluency and their language fluency were found, suggesting that bilingual children's skill in their nondominant language was associated with arithmetic fluency. These findings point to the importance of examining individual differences in language fluency among bilinguals to understand how bilingualism may shape cognitive skills.

The role of syntactic cues in monolingual and bilingual two-year-olds' novel word disambiguation.

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.

Sorting out emotions: How labels influence emotion categorization.

The ability to categorize emotions has long-term implications for children's social and emotional development. Therefore, identifying factors that influence early emotion categorization is of great importance. Yet, whether and how language impacts emotion category development is still widely debated. The present study aimed to assess how labels influence young children's ability to group faces into emotion categories for both earliest-learned and later-learned emotion categories. Across two studies, 128 two- and 3-year-olds (77 female; Mean age = 3.04 years; 35.9% White, 12.5% Multiple ethnicities or races, 6.3% Asian, 3.1% Black, and 42.2% not reported) were presented with three emotion categories (Study 1 = happy, sad, angry; Study 2 = surprised, disgusted, afraid). Children sorted 30 images of adults posing stereotypical facial expressions into one of the three categories. Children were randomly assigned to either hear the emotion labels before sorting (e.g., "happy faces go here") or were not given labels (e.g., "faces like this go here"). Study 1 results indicated no significant effects of labels for earlier-learned emotion categories, F(1, 60) = .94, p = .337, ηp² = .013. However, the Study 2 results revealed that labels improved emotion categorization for later-learned categories, F(1, 60) = 8.15, p = .006, ηp² = .024. Taken together, these results suggest that labels are important for emotion categorization, but the impact of labels may depend on children's familiarity with the emotion category. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Analytic Causal Knowledge for Constructing Useable Empirical Causal Knowledge: Two Experiments on Pre-schoolers.

The present paper examines a type of abstract domain-general knowledge required for the process of constructing useable domain-specific causal knowledge, the evident goal of causal learning. It tests the hypothesis that analytic knowledge of causal-invariance decomposition functions is essential for this process. Such knowledge specifies the decomposition of an observed outcome into contributions from constituent causes under the default assumption that the empirical knowledge acquired is invariant across contextual/background causes. The paper reports two psychological experiments (and replication studies) with pre-school-age children on generalization across contexts involving binary cause and effect variables. The critical role of causal invariance for constructing useable causal knowledge predicts that even young children should (tacitly) use the causal-invariance decomposition function for such variables rather than a non-causal-invariance decomposition function common in statistical practice in research involving binary outcomes. The findings support the rational shaping of empirical causal knowledge by the causal-invariance constraint, ruling out alternative explanations in terms of non-causal-invariance decomposition functions, heuristics, and biases. For the same causal structure involving candidate causes and outcomes that are binary variables with a "present" value and an "absent" value, the paper argues against the possibility of multiple rational characterizations of the "sameness of causal influence" that justifies generalization across contexts.

Contextual variation in language input to children: A naturalistic approach.

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 M = 3 years, 5 months) and at least one additional sibling. The families were filmed as they interacted in their homes and communities over 2 weekdays and 2 weekend days. From these videos, we identified when the focal child was exposed to language input and randomly selected 9 hr of contiguous speech segments per family to obtain 6,129 noun types and 30,257 noun tokens in language input and 1,072 noun types and 5,360 noun tokens in children's speech. We examined whether the words that children heard in more variable spatial and speaker contexts were produced with greater frequency by children. The results suggest that both the number of places and the number of speakers that characterized a child's exposure to a noun were positively associated with the child's production of that noun, independent of how frequently the word was spoken. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotion words link faces to emotional scenarios in early childhood.

Recent theories have suggested that emotion words may facilitate the development of emotion concepts. The present study investigates whether emotion words affect children's performance on an emotion category learning task. Across two experiments, 72 three-year-old children (49 female) were asked to identify which emotional face best matched particular emotional scenarios during nine pretest and nine posttest trials. The scenarios in the present studies aligned with emotions typically learned among older age groups (annoyed, disgusted, and nervous). Between pretest and posttest, children participated in training in which a facial configuration (annoyed, disgusted, or nervous) was paired with an associated scenario while they heard the emotion labeled explicitly or heard irrelevant information (Experiment 1) or heard a broad emotion label versus irrelevant information (Experiment 2). Aside from the labels presented, all other information was kept the same across conditions, including the specific faces and scenarios heard during learning trials. In Experiment 1, children's emotion understanding increased more from pretest to posttest in the explicit label versus irrelevant condition, t(34) = 2.26, p = .030, d = .75, but in Experiment 2 the broad emotion labels did not provide an advantage over irrelevant information, t(34) = .72, p = .474, d = .24. These results suggest that emotion labels may be particularly helpful for young children learning about unfamiliar emotions, because specific labels may help children to aggregate disparate emotional information into meaningful categories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Toddler Word Learning is Robust to Changes in Emotional Context.

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<.01), but performance did not significantly differ by condition (F(3,52)=0.51, p=.677). These results provide valuable information regarding potential boundaries for when contextual information may versus may not influence children's word learning.

Emotion Words in Early Childhood: A Language Transcript Analysis.

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 (ß=.21, p<.001), but not by child or mother language complexity (ß=.01, p=.690; ß=.00, p=.872). Frequency of specific emotion words are presented, as are developmental trends in early emotion language production and input. These results improve the understanding of children's daily emotional language environments and may inform theories of emotional development.

One versus many: Multiple examples in word learning.

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.

How Bilingual Parents Talk to Children About Number in Mandarin and English.

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.

Two-year-olds' executive functioning: The influence of task-specific vocabulary knowledge.

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.

Consider the category: The effect of spacing depends on individual learning histories.

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.

Children's use of linguistic information when learning in a bilingual context.

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.

Equal spacing and expanding schedules in children's categorization and generalization.

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 on 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 24h, with children in the expanding condition significantly outperforming children in the equally spaced learning condition. These results suggest that forgetting and retrieval dynamics may be lower level cognitive mechanisms promoting generalization and have several implications for broad theories of learning, cognition, and development.

How symbolic experience shapes children's symbolic flexibility.

The current experiments asked whether children with dual-symbolic experience (e.g., unimodal bilingual and bimodal) develop a preference for words like monolingual children (Namy & Waxman, 1998). In Experiment 1, ninety-five 18- and 24-month-olds, with monolingual, unimodal bilingual, or bimodal symbolic experience, were tested in their willingness to treat digitized sounds as referents. In Experiment 2, forty-seven 24-month-olds, with the same types of symbolic experience, were tested in their willingness to treat novel words as referents. Monolingual children performed in ways indicative of a growing preference for words, whereas children with dual-symbolic experience performed in ways indicative of consistency in symbolic flexibility over time. Results suggest that the developmental trajectory of children's symbolic flexibility might depend on their symbolic experience.

Retrieval dynamics and retention in cross-situational statistical word learning.

Previous research on cross-situational word learning has demonstrated that learners are able to reduce ambiguity in mapping words to referents by tracking co-occurrence probabilities across learning events. In the current experiments, we examined whether learners are able to retain mappings over time. The results revealed that learners are able to retain mappings for up to 1 week later. However, there were interactions between the amount of retention and the different learning conditions. Interestingly, the strongest retention was associated with a learning condition that engendered retrieval dynamics that initially challenged the learner but eventually led to more successful retrieval toward the end of learning. The ease/difficulty of retrieval is a critical process underlying cross-situational word learning and is a powerful example of how learning dynamics affect long-term learning outcomes.

Does bilingual experience affect early visual perceptual development?

Visual attention and perception develop rapidly during the first few months after birth, and these behaviors are critical components in the development of language and cognitive abilities. Here we ask how early bilingual experiences might lead to differences in visual attention and perception. Experiments 1-3 investigated the looking behavior of monolingual and bilingual infants when presented with social (Experiment 1), mixed (Experiment 2), or non-social (Experiment 3) stimuli. In each of these experiments, infants' dwell times (DT) and number of fixations to areas of interest (AOIs) were analyzed, giving a sense of where the infants looked. To examine how the infants looked at the stimuli in a more global sense, Experiment 4 combined and analyzed the saccade data collected in Experiments 1-3. There were no significant differences between monolingual and bilingual infants' DTs, AOI fixations, or saccade characteristics (specifically, frequency, and amplitude) in any of the experiments. These results suggest that monolingual and bilingual infants process their visual environments similarly, supporting the idea that the substantial cognitive differences between monolinguals and bilinguals in early childhood are more related to active vocabulary production than perception of the environment.

Who is she? Changes in the person context affect categorization.

Changes between the learning and testing contexts affect learning, memory, and generalization. We examined whether a change (between learning and testing) in the person children were interacting with affects generalization. Three-, four-, and five-year-old children were trained on eight novel noun categories by one experimenter. Children were tested for their ability to generalize the label to a new category member by either the same experimenter who trained them or by a novel experimenter. Three-year-old children's performance was not affected by who they were tested by. Four- and five-year-old children's performance was lower when tested by the novel experimenter. The results are discussed in terms of source monitoring and the effect of perceptual context change on category generalization.

Same, varied, or both? Contextual support aids young children in generalizing category labels.

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.

Distributing learning over time: the spacing effect in children's acquisition and generalization of science concepts.

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.