Human infants display complex categoriztion abilities. Results from studies of visual
preference, object examination, conditioned leg-kicking, sequential touching, and …

Research on infant cognition using habituation methods has sparked considerable
controversy in recent years. At the core of the debates is the issue of whether infants have …

What are the processes, from conception to adulthood, that enable a single cell to grow into
a sentient adult? The processes that occur along the way are so complex that any attempt to …

What do novice word learners know about the sound of words? Word-learning tasks suggest
that young infants (14 months old) confuse similar-sounding words, whereas …

Several recent studiesfrom our laboratory have shown that14-month old infants have
difficulty learning to associate two phonetically similar new words to two different objects …

Much of what psychologists know about infant perception and cognition is based on
habituation, but the process itself is still poorly understood. Here the authors offer a dynamic …

Children improve at word learning during the 2nd year of life—sometimes dramatically. This
fact has suggested a change in mechanism, from associative learning to a more referential …

Young infants show unexplained asymmetries in the exclusivity of categories formed on the
basis of visually presented stimuli. A connectionist model is described that shows similar …

Several recent experiments indicate that, when learning words, children are not as sensitive
to phonemic differences (eg,/d/vs./t/) as they are in discrimination tasks [Pater, J., Stager, CL …

Scholars studying the origins and evolution of language are also interested in the general
issue of the evolution of cognition. Language is not an isolated capability of the individual …