Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · October 2024
By 4 or 5 years of age, children understand when their own past beliefs were incorrect, or when others' current beliefs are incorrect. In the current study, we asked whether young children understand when their own current belief might be incorrect. 3- and ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · October 1, 2024
Committed partners feel normatively bound to one another. This normative pressure causes partners not to abandon one another for attractive alternatives. Research suggests that this sense of commitment emerges at around 3 years of age. This study investiga ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · October 1, 2024
In a single experiment, we asked whether children would be more likely to accept blame for another's transgression when the individual had previously told a prosocial lie that improved the child's reputation. 3- and 5-year-old children (N=120) were introdu ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · June 2024
A foundational mechanism underlying human cooperation is reciprocity. In the context of repeated interactions with others, it is not always clear the degree to which in-kind responses reflect responsiveness to partners' prior behaviors ("reactive" response ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · May 2024
The current study investigated whether age-related changes in the conceptualization of social groups influences interpretation of the pronoun we. Sixty-four 2- and 4-year-olds (N = 29 female, 50 White-identifying) viewed scenarios in which it was ambiguous ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · March 2024
Sometimes we have a personal preference but we agree with others to follow a different course of action. In this study, 3- and 5-year-old children (N = 160) expressed a preference for playing a game one way and were then confronted with peers who expressed ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · January 2024
We report two experiments on children's tendency to enhance their reputations through communicative acts. In the experiments, 4-year-olds (N = 120) had the opportunity to inform a social partner that they had helped him in his absence. In a first experimen ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2024
The pronoun we can be used to refer to various collections of people depending on various pragmatic factors. This article reports the results of two online experiments that investigated children's interpretation of inclusive we, in which the child-listener ...
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Journal ArticleChild Development Perspectives · January 1, 2024
Chimpanzees and other great apes seem to be much less cooperative than humans overall, yet they nevertheless reliably help others in many instrumental circumstances. Although in many contexts the helping behavior of chimpanzees is quite similar to that of ...
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Journal ArticleHuman nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · December 2023
Humans share with other mammals and primates many social motivations and emotions, but they are also much more cooperative than even their closest primate relatives. Here I review recent comparative experiments and analyses that illustrate humans' species- ...
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Journal ArticleFirst Language · October 1, 2023
Shared intentionality theory posits that at age 3, children expand their conception of plural agency to include 3- or more-person groups. We sought to determine whether this conceptual shift is detectable in children’s pronoun use. We report the results of ...
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Journal ArticlePerspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · October 2023
Many mechanisms of social bonding are common to all primates, but humans seemingly have developed some that are unique to the species. These involve various kinds of interactive experiences-from taking a walk together to having a conversation-whose common ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · May 2023
Reciprocal food exchange is widespread in human societies but not among great apes, who may view food mainly as a target for competition. Understanding the similarities and differences between great apes' and humans' willingness to exchange food is importa ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · April 2023
Young children share equally when they acquire resources through collaboration with a partner, yet it is unclear whether they do so because in such contexts resources are encountered as common and distributed in front of the recipient or because collaborat ...
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Journal ArticleCognition · February 2023
The current study investigates infants' and toddlers' understanding of teasing interactions and its effect on subsequent social interactions. Teasing is a special kind of social interaction due to its dual nature: It consists of a slightly provocative cont ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · January 2023
We investigated children's positive emotions as an indicator of their underlying prosocial motivation. In Study 1, 2-, and 5-year-old children (N = 64) could either help an individual or watch as another person provided help. Following the helping event an ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal cognition · January 2023
Twenty-five years ago, at the founding of this journal, there existed only a few conflicting findings about great apes' social-cognitive skills (theory of mind). In the 2 ½ decades since, we have discovered that great apes understand the goals, intentions, ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · January 2023
The cooperative eye hypothesis posits that human eye morphology evolved to facilitate cooperation. Although it is known that young children prefer stimuli with eyes that contain white sclera, it is unknown whether white sclera influences children's percept ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2023
This chapter looks at a major cause and a major consequence of the 9-month social-cognitive revolution; and both of these also concern infant intentionality. It argues that young children’s understanding of other persons as intentional agents results in la ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · November 2022
Although theorists agree that social interactions play a major role in moral development, previous research has not experimentally assessed how specific features of social interactions affect children's moral judgments and reasoning. The current study asse ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · October 1, 2022
Morality includes a common ground ranking of values, of which a central theme is that prosocial actions are more justifiable than selfish ones. Learning to distinguish between good versus bad justifications for actions based on a common ground ranking of v ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · September 2022
Reaching agreements in conflicts is an important developmental challenge. Here, German 5-year-olds (N = 284, 49% female, mostly White, mixed socioeconomic backgrounds; data collection: June 2016-November 2017) faced repeated face-to-face bargaining problem ...
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Journal ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · September 2022
Great apes can discern what others are attending to and even direct others' attention to themselves in flexible ways. But they seemingly do not coordinate their attention with one another recursively-understanding that the other is monitoring their attenti ...
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Journal ArticleSynthese · April 1, 2022
Chimpanzees and humans are close evolutionary relatives who behave in many of the same ways based on a similar type of agentive organization. To what degree do they experience the world in similar ways as well? Using contemporary research in evolutionarily ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · March 2022
Several species can detect when they are uncertain about what decision to make-revealed by opting out of the choice, or by seeking more information before deciding. However, we do not know whether any nonhuman animals recognize when they need more informat ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · February 2022
By around 3 years of age, collaboration induces in young children a normative sense of "we" that creates a sense of obligation (e.g., commitment, fairness) toward their collaborative partner. The current study investigated whether this normative sense of w ...
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Journal ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · January 2022
The biological approach to culture focuses almost exclusively on processes of social learning, to the neglect of processes of cultural coordination including joint action and shared intentionality. In this paper, we argue that the distinctive features of h ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · January 2022
Individuals in all societies conform to their cultural group's conventional norms, from how to dress on certain occasions to how to play certain games. It is an open question, however, whether individuals in all societies actively enforce the group's conve ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2022
In this chapter, we consider children’s moral development from an evolutionary perspective. We propose that human morality arose evolutionarily as a set of skills and motives for cooperating with others. Following recent accounts by Tomasello and colleague ...
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Journal ArticleThe Behavioral and brain sciences · November 2021
More basic than the authors' distinction between knowing and believing is a distinction between knowledge-by-acquaintance (I know John Smith) and propositional knowledge/belief (I know/believe that John Smith lives in Durham). This distinction provides a b ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · October 1, 2021
Recent research suggests that young children's causal justification for minimal group membership can be induced via a cognitive framework of mutual intentionality. That is, an individual can become a group member when both the individual and group agree to ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · October 1, 2021
There are sometimes legitimate reasons for breaking a promise when circumstances change. We investigated 3- and 5-year-old German children's understanding of promise breaking in prosocial (helping someone else) and selfish (playing with someone else) condi ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · July 2021
Two- and 3-year-old children (N = 96) were tested in an object-choice task with video presentations of peer and adult partners. An immersive, semi-interactive procedure enabled both the close matching of adult and peer conditions and the combination of par ...
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Journal ArticleReview of Philosophy and Psychology · June 1, 2021
I respond to Moll, Nichols, and Mackey’s review of my book Becoming Human. I agree with many of their points, but have my own point of view on some others. ...
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Journal ArticleAnalyse und Kritik · June 1, 2021
Birch's account of the evolutionary origins of social norms is essentially individualistic. It begins with individuals regulating their own actions toward internally represented goals, as evaluative standards, and adds in a social dimension only secondaril ...
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Journal ArticlePsychological science · May 2021
After two strangers have briefly interacted with one another, both believe that they like their partner more than their partner likes them. A plausible explanation for this liking gap is that people are constantly worrying about how others are evalu ...
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Journal ArticleSynthese · May 1, 2021
Growing evidence indicates that our higher rational capacities depend on social interaction—that only through engaging with others do we acquire the ability to evaluate beliefs as true or false, or to reflect on and evaluate the reasons that support our be ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983) · May 2021
Chimpanzees help conspecifics achieve their goals in instrumental situations, but neither their immediate motivation nor the evolutionary basis of their motivation is clear. In the current study, we gave chimpanzees the opportunity to instrumentally help a ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · January 2021
Although there is considerable evidence that at least some helping behavior is motivated by genuine concern for others' well-being, sometimes we also help solely out of a sense of obligation to the persons in need. Our sense of obligation to help may be pa ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · January 1, 2021
Moral judgments can vary depending on the social relationship between agents. We presented 4- and 6-year-old peer dyads (N = 128) with stories, in which a parent (parent condition) or a peer protagonist (peer condition) faced a child in need of help (e.g., ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2021
A key skill in collaborative problem-solving is to communicate and evaluate reasons for proposals to arrive at the decision benefiting all group members. Although it is well-documented that collaborative contexts facilitate young children's reasoning, less ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2021
Adults under time pressure share with others generously, but with more time they act more selfishly. In the current study, we investigated whether young children already operate in this same way, and, if so, whether this changes over the preschool and earl ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2021
As members of cultural groups, humans continually adhere to social norms and conventions. Researchers have hypothesized that even young children are motivated to act conventionally, but support for this hypothesis has been indirect and open to other interp ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2021
The underlying assumption of the Bridge Hypothesis-which is not shared by all developmental psycholinguists-is that communication pressure is beneficial to the child’s development of communicative competence, including the acquisition of linguistic skills. ...
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Journal ArticleChild Development Perspectives · December 1, 2020
The key context within which preschool children learn to justify beliefs with reasons is collaborative problem-solving and decision-making with peers, including in the moral domain, in which they engage with another coequal mind in a cooperative spirit. Ev ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · November 2020
To create social closeness, humans engage in a variety of social activities centered around shared experiences. Even simply watching the same video side by side creates social closeness in adults and children. However, perhaps surprisingly, a similar psych ...
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Journal ArticleInternational Journal of Behavioral Development · November 1, 2020
The current study aimed to investigate the cultural differences in the developmental origins of children’s intent-based moral judgment and moral behavior in the context of indirect reciprocity. To this end, we compared how German and Chinese children inter ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · November 2020
Individuals with an advantageous position during a negotiation possess leverage over their partners. Several studies with adults have investigated how leverage can influence the coordination strategies of individuals when conflicts of interest arise. In th ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · October 2020
Young children help and share with others, but little is known about the "how" and "who" of this early prosocial behavior. In the current study, we compared 2- and 3-year-old children's (N = 203; 101 girls) prosocial behavior of sharing and helping. We ask ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · October 1, 2020
Little is known about the underlying emotional bases of children's prosociality. Here we engaged 32 dyads of 4-year-old children in a reward-collecting task at the end of which one child was more in need of help. An adult then either helped the needier chi ...
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Journal ArticleEpisteme · September 1, 2020
In this paper, I approach epistemic norms from an ontogenetic point of view. I argue and present evidence that to understand epistemic norms - e.g., scientific norms of methodology and the evaluation of evidence - children must first develop through their ...
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Book · August 19, 2020
The Gestural Communication of Apes and Monkeys is an intriguing compilation of naturalistic and experimental research conducted over the course of 20 years on gestural communication in primates, as well as a comparison to what is known about the vocal comm ...
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Journal ArticlePsychological science · July 2020
Cumulative cultural learning has been argued to rely on high-fidelity copying of other individuals' actions. Iconic gestures of actions have no physical effect on objects in the world but merely represent actions that would have an effect. Learning from ic ...
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Journal ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · July 2020
This special issue focuses on the relationship between life history and learning, especially during human evolution. 'Life history' refers to the developmental programme of an organism, including its period of immaturity, reproductive rate and timing, care ...
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Journal ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · July 2020
Humans possess some unique social-cognitive skills and motivations, involving such things as joint attention, cooperative communication, dual-level collaboration and cultural learning. These are almost certainly adaptations for humans' especially complex s ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · June 2020
People frequently need to cooperate despite having strong self-serving motives. In the current study, pairs of 5- and 7-year-olds (N = 160) faced a one-shot coordination problem: To benefit, children had to choose the same of 3 reward divisions. The ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · May 2020
Humans, including young children, are strongly motivated to help others, even paying a cost to do so. Humans' nearest primate relatives, great apes, are likewise motivated to help others, raising the question of whether the motivations of humans and apes a ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · May 2020
In collaborative problem solving, children produce and evaluate arguments for proposals. We investigated whether 3- and 5-year-olds (N = 192) can produce and evaluate arguments against those arguments (i.e., counter-arguments). In Study 1, each child withi ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · May 2020
Collaborative reasoning requires partners to evaluate options and the evidence for or against each option. We investigated whether preschoolers can explain why one option is best (direct reasons) and why the other option is not (indirect reasons), looking ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983) · May 2020
In both the wild and captivity, chimpanzees engage in reciprocal patterns of prosocial behavior. However, the proximate mechanisms underlying these patterns are unclear. In the current study, we investigated whether chimpanzees prefer to act prosocially to ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983) · May 2020
One of the challenges of collaboration is to coordinate decisions with others, and recent theories have proposed that humans, in particular, evolved skills to address this challenge. To test this hypothesis, we compared the coordination abilities of 4-year ...
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Journal ArticleThe Behavioral and brain sciences · April 2020
My response to the commentaries focuses on four issues: (1) the diversity both within and between cultures of the many different faces of obligation; (2) the possible evolutionary roots of the sense of obligation, including possible sources that I did not ...
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Journal ArticleJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour · March 1, 2020
To understand themselves as playing a social role, individuals must understand themselves to be contributing to a cooperative endeavor. Psychologically, the form of cooperation required is a specific type that only humans may possess, namely, one in which ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · January 2020
Access to and control of resources is a major source of costly conflicts. Animals, under some conditions, respect what others control and use (i.e. possession). Humans not only respect possession of resources, they also respect ownership. Ownership can be ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · January 2020
Human social relationships are often formed through shared social activities in which individuals share mental states about external stimuli. Previous work on joint attention has shown that even minimal shared experiences such as watching something togethe ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Pragmatics · January 1, 2020
To assess children's cognitive capacities to understand (rather than explain or paraphrase) metaphors, we investigated how 3-year-olds (n = 36; 3;0–3;3) fare with novel metaphors corresponding to their world knowledge and linguistic competences using a beh ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · December 2019
A natural reaction to receiving help from someone is to help that person in return. In two studies, we investigated the developmental origins of children's motivation to return help. In Study 1, 18- and 24-month-old toddlers were either helped or not helpe ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · December 2019
How the world's 6,000+ natural languages have arisen is mostly unknown. Yet, new sign languages have emerged recently among deaf people brought together in a community, offering insights into the dynamics of language evolution. However, documenting the eme ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · November 2019
There has been extensive research into the development of selective trust in testimony, but little is known about the development of selective trust in promises. The present research investigates children's (N = 264) selective trust in others' promises to ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · November 2019
This study investigated the influence of underlying intentions and outcomes of a partner's sharing behavior on young children's reciprocity. We provided 3- and 5-year-old children with the opportunity to share with a partner following different treatments ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · November 2019
Children's moral behavior is guided, in part, by adults teaching children how to treat others. However, when circumstances change, such instructions may become either unhelpful or limiting. In the current study, 48 dyads of 5-year-olds played a collaborati ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · November 2019
Ownership is a cornerstone of many human societies and can be understood as a cooperative arrangement, where individuals refrain from taking each other's property. Owners can thus trust others to respect their property even in their absence. We investigate ...
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Journal ArticlePrimates; journal of primatology · November 2019
We investigated whether chimpanzees use the temporal sequence of external events to determine causation. Seventeen chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) witnessed a human experimenter press a button in two different conditions. When she pressed the "causal button" ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · November 2019
Children encounter moral norms in several different social contexts. Often it is in hierarchically structured interactions with parents or other adults, but sometimes it is in more symmetrically structured interactions with peers. Our question was whether ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · October 1, 2019
When reasoning with others, the reasons used in an exchange can have varying degrees of quality, irrespective of the facts under discussion. Partners often evaluate one another's evaluation of reasons – one another's reasoning. Can children evaluate their ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · August 2019
When young children form a joint commitment with a partner, they understand that this agreement generates obligations. In this study, we investigated whether young children understand that joint commitments, and their associated obligations, may likewise b ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal cognition · July 2019
We and our colleagues have been doing studies of great ape gestural communication for more than 30 years. Here we attempt to spell out what we have learned. Some aspects of the process have been reliably established by multiple researchers, for example, it ...
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Journal ArticleInfancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies · July 2019
At around their third birthday, children begin to enforce social norms on others impersonally, often using generic normative language, but little is known about the developmental building blocks of this abstract norm understanding. Here, we investigate whe ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · July 2019
Humans create social closeness with one another through a variety of shared social activities in which they align their emotions or mental states towards an external stimulus such as dancing to music together, playing board games together or even engaging ...
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Journal ArticleTrends in cognitive sciences · June 2019
One influential view holds that children's sense of fairness emerges at age 8 and is rooted in the development of an aversion to unequal resource distributions. Here, we suggest two amendments to this view. First, we argue and present evidence that childre ...
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Journal ArticleScientific reports · May 2019
Competition over scarce resources is common across the animal kingdom. Here we investigate the strategies of chimpanzees and children in a limited resource problem. Both species were presented with a tug-of-war apparatus in which each individual in a dyad ...
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Journal ArticleThe Behavioral and brain sciences · May 2019
Although psychologists have paid scant attention to the sense of obligation as a distinctly human motivation, moral philosophers have identified two of its key features: First, it has a peremptory, demanding force, with a kind of coercive quality, and seco ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · April 2019
Successful collaboration often relies on individuals' capacity to communicate with each other. Despite extensive research on chimpanzee communication, there is little evidence that chimpanzees are capable, without extensive human training, of regulating co ...
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Journal ArticleNeuropsychologia · March 2019
Children are motivated to help others from an early age. However, little is known about the internal biological mechanisms underlying their motivation to help. Here, we compiled data from five separate studies in which children, ranging in age from 18 mont ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · March 2019
The recognition of iconic correspondence between signal and referent has been argued to bootstrap the acquisition and emergence of language. Here, we study the ontogeny, and to some extent the phylogeny, of the ability to spontaneously relate iconic signal ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · March 2019
Humans cultivate their reputations as good cooperators, sometimes even competing with group mates, to appear most cooperative to individuals during the process of selecting partners. To investigate the ontogenetic origins of such "competitive altruism," we ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · March 2019
Humans are frequently required to coordinate their actions in social dilemmas (e.g. when one of two drivers has to yield for the other at an intersection). This is commonly achieved by individuals following communally known rules that prescribe how people ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · February 2019
Reputational concerns are known to promote cooperation. Individuals regularly act more prosocially when their behavior is observable by others. Here, we investigate 4- and 5-year-old (N = 144) children's reputational strategies in a competitive group setti ...
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Journal ArticleEvolution and Human Behavior · January 1, 2019
Cooperation often comes with the temptation to defect and benefit at the cost of others. This tension between cooperation and defection is best captured in social dilemmas like the Prisoner's Dilemma. Adult humans have specific strategies to maintain coope ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · January 2019
The problem with collaboration is that there are temptations to defect. Explicit joint commitments are designed to mitigate some of the risks, but people also feel committed to others implicitly when they both know together that they each hold the other's ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2019
This study investigated how the presence of others and anticipated distributions for self influence children's fairness-related decisions in two different socio-moral contexts. In the first part, three- and five-year-old children (N = 120) decided between ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2019
Chimpanzees hunt cooperatively in the wild, but the factors influencing food sharing after the hunt are not well understood. In an experimental study, groups of three captive chimpanzees obtained a monopolizable food resource, either via two individuals co ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2019
Animals can use punishment as a means to change the behavior of others. Punishment can be done for selfish ends with no regard for how the target of the act is affected. On the other extreme, it can benefit others in a society and be motivated by its effec ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2019
Animals can use punishment as a means to change the behavior of others. Punishment can be done for selfish ends with no regard for how the target of the act is affected. On the other extreme, it can benefit others in a society and be motivated by its effec ...
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Journal ArticleCognition · October 2018
Making commitments to cooperate facilitates cooperation. There is a long-standing theoretical debate about how promissory obligations come into existence, and whether linguistic acts (such as saying "I promise") are a necessary part of the process. To info ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · October 1, 2018
Children must learn not to trust everyone to avoid being taken advantage of. In the current study, 5- and 7-year-old children were paired with a partner whose incentives were either congruent (cooperative condition) or conflicting (competitive condition) w ...
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Journal ArticleHuman Development · October 1, 2018
The Cooperation Theory of moral development starts from the premise that morality is a special form of cooperation. Before 3 years of age, children help and share with others prosocially, and they collaborate with others in ways that foster a sense of equa ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · September 2018
When children make a joint commitment to collaborate, obligations are created. Pairs of 3-year-old children (N = 144) made a joint commitment to play a game. In three different conditions the game was interrupted in the middle either because: (a) the partn ...
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Journal ArticleChild Development Perspectives · September 1, 2018
In this article, I recount my history of research with great apes. From the beginning, the idea was to compare apes to human children, with an eye to discovering facts relevant to describing and explaining processes of human development. The research went ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · September 2018
In the current study, 24- to 27-month-old children (N = 37) used pointing gestures in a cooperative object choice task with either peer or adult partners. When indicating the location of a hidden toy, children pointed equally accurately for adult and peer ...
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Journal ArticleCognition · August 2018
Recent evidence suggests that infants as young as 12 month of age use pointing to communicate about absent entities. The tacit assumption underlying these studies is that infants do so based on tracking what their interlocutor experienced in a previous sha ...
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Journal ArticlePsychology and Marketing · August 1, 2018
Human adults often show a preference for scarce over abundant goods. In this paper, we investigate whether this preference was shared by 4- and 6-year-old children as well as chimpanzees, humans’ nearest primate relative. Neither chimpanzees nor 4-year-old ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · August 2018
To predict and explain the behavior of others, one must understand that their actions are determined not by reality but by their beliefs about reality. Classically, children come to understand beliefs, including false beliefs, at about 4-5 y of age, but re ...
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Journal ArticlePhilosophical Psychology · July 4, 2018
Here I summarize the main points in my 2016 book, A Natural History of Human Morality. Taking an evolutionary point of view, I characterize human morality as a special form of cooperation. In particular, human morality represents a kind of we > me orientat ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · July 2018
Prosocial and normative behavior emerges in early childhood, but substantial changes in prosocial behavior in middle childhood may be due to it becoming integrated with children's understanding of what is normative. Here we show that information about what ...
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Journal ArticleThe British journal of developmental psychology · March 2018
We report two studies that demonstrate how five- and seven-year-olds adapt their production of arguments to either a cooperative or a competitive context. Two games elicited agreements from peer dyads about placing animals on either of two halves of a play ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · March 2018
Young children engage in direct reciprocity, but the mechanisms underlying such reciprocity remain unclear. In particular, prior work leaves unclear whether children's reciprocity is simply a response to receiving benefits (regardless of whether the benefi ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · March 2018
The current study investigated children's intention-based sociomoral judgments and distribution behavior from a third-party stance. An actor puppet showed either positive or negative intention toward a target puppet, which had previously performed a prosoc ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · February 2018
People accept an unequal distribution of resources if they judge that the decision-making process was fair. In this study, 3- and 5-year-old children played an allocation game with two puppets. The puppets decided against a fair distribution in all conditi ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · February 2018
In collaborative decision making, children must evaluate the evidence behind their respective claims and the rationality of their respective proposals with their partners. In the main study, 5- and 7-year-old peer dyads (N = 196) were presented with a nove ...
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Journal ArticlePsychological science · February 2018
The motivation to build and maintain a positive personal reputation promotes prosocial behavior. But individuals also identify with their groups, and so it is possible that the desire to maintain or enhance group reputation may have similar effects. Here, ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · February 2018
Moral justifications work, when they do, by invoking values that are shared in the common ground of the interlocutors. We asked 3- and 5-year-old peer dyads (N = 144) to identify and punish norm transgressors. In the moral condition, the transgressor viola ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2018
Captive great apes regularly use pointing gestures in their interactions with humans. However, the precise function of this gesture is unknown. One possibility is that apes use pointing primarily to direct attention (as in "please look at that"); another i ...
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Journal ArticleLinguistic Approaches to Bilingualism · January 1, 2018
Language development in bilingual children is often related to differing levels of proficiency. Objective measurements of bilingual development include for example mean length of utterance (MLU). MLU is almost always calculated for each language context (i ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2018
The ‘ape language’ studies have come and gone, with wildly divergent claims about what they have shown. Without question, the most sophisticated skills have been displayed by Kanzi, a male bonobo exposed from youth to a human-like communicative system. Thi ...
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Journal ArticleLinguistic Approaches to Bilingualism · January 1, 2018
Intra-sentential code-mixing presents a number of puzzles for theories of bilingualism. In this paper, we examine the code-mixed English-German utterances of a young English-German-Spanish trilingual child between 1;10 – 3;1, using both an extensive diary ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2018
Social primates can influence others through the control of resources. For instance, dominant male chimpanzees might allow subordinates access to mate with females in exchange for social support. However, little is known about how chimpanzees strategically ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · December 2017
Human adults incline toward moral objectivism but may approach things more relativistically if different cultures are involved. In this study, 4-, 6-, and 9-year-old children (N=136) witnessed two parties who disagreed about moral matters: a normative judg ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · September 2017
Toddlers are remarkably prosocial toward adults, yet little is known about their helping behavior toward peers. In the present study with 18- and 30-month-old toddlers (n = 192, 48 dyads per age group), one child needed help reaching an object to continue ...
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Journal ArticleHuman nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · September 2017
To explain the evolutionary emergence of uniquely human skills and motivations for cooperation, Tomasello et al. (2012, in Current Anthropology 53(6):673-92) proposed the interdependence hypothesis. The key adaptive context in this account was the obligate ...
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Journal ArticleSocial Development · August 1, 2017
From early on in ontogeny, young children hear things being said about particular individuals. Here we investigate the ways in which testimony with social content, that is, gossip, influences children's decision-making. We explored whether five-year-old (N ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · August 2017
Chimpanzees' refusal of less-preferred food when an experimenter has previously provided preferred food to a conspecific has been taken as evidence for a sense of fairness. Here, we present a novel hypothesis-the social disappointment hypothesis-according ...
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Journal ArticleScientific reports · August 2017
Chimpanzees and bonobos are highly capable of tracking other's mental states. It has been proposed, however, that in contrast to humans, chimpanzees are only able to do this in competitive interactions but this has rarely been directly tested. Here, pairs ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · July 2017
Little is known about the flexibility of children's prosocial motivation. Here, 2- and 3-year-old children's (n = 128) internal arousal, as measured via changes in pupil dilation, was increased after they accidentally harmed a victim but were unable to rep ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · July 2017
Promises are speech acts that create an obligation to do the promised action. In three studies, we investigated whether 3- and 5-year-olds (N=278) understand the normative implications of promising in prosocial interactions. In Study 1, children helped a p ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · July 2017
Humans regularly provide others with resources at a personal cost to themselves. Chimpanzees engage in some cooperative behaviors in the wild as well, but their motivational underpinnings are unclear. In three experiments, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences · June 7, 2017
Social animals need to coordinate with others to reap the benefits of group-living even when individuals’ interests are misaligned. We compare how
chimpanzees, bonobos and children coordinate their actions with a conspecific in a Snowdrift game, which prov ...
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Journal ArticleThe British journal of developmental psychology · June 2017
Young children enforce social norms from early on, but little research has examined how this enforcement behaviour emerges. This study investigated whether observing an adult's norm enforcement influences children's own enforcement of that norm compared wi ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · June 2017
The current study explored how freedom of choice affects preschoolers' prosocial motivation. Children (3- and 5-year-olds) participated in either a choice condition (where they could decide for themselves whether to help or not) or a no-choice condition (w ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Cognition and Development · March 15, 2017
Much research has investigated how children relate to norms taught to them by adult authorities. Very few studies have investigated norms that arise out of children’s own peer interactions. In two studies, we investigated how 5- and 7-year-old children tea ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · March 2017
The age at which young children show an aversion to inequitable resource distributions, especially those favoring themselves, is unclear. It is also unclear whether great apes, as humans' nearest evolutionary relatives, have an aversion to inequitable reso ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · February 2017
Humans constantly have to coordinate their decisions with others even when their interests are conflicting (e.g., when 2 drivers have to decide who yields at an intersection). So far, however, little is known about the development of these abilities. Here, ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · January 2017
Much is known about young children's helping behavior, but little is known about the underlying motivations and emotions involved. In 2 studies we found that 2-year-old children showed positive emotions of similar magnitude-as measured by changes in their ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2017
Understanding the behavior of others in a wide variety of circumstances requires an understanding of their psychological states. Humans' nearest primate relatives, the great apes, understand many psychological states of others, for example, perceptions, go ...
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Journal ArticleCommunicative & integrative biology · January 2017
Much debate concerns whether any nonhuman animals share with humans the ability to infer others' mental states, such as desires and beliefs. In a recent eye-tracking false-belief task, we showed that great apes correctly anticipated that a human actor woul ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2017
The modern study of moral development began with Piaget’s (1932) The Moral Judgment of the Child, which although originally published in the 1930s only became internationally known in the 1960s through its influence on Kohlberg’s theory (e.g. Kohlberg, 198 ...
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Book · January 1, 2017
This book, which gathers in one place the theories of 10 leading cognitive and functional linguists, represents a new approach that may define the next era in the history of psychology: It promises to give psychologists a new appreciation of what this vari ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2017
Social animals frequently rely on information from other individuals. This can be costly in case the other individual is mistaken or even deceptive. Human infants below 4 years of age show proficiency in their reliance on differently reliable informants. T ...
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Journal ArticleInfancy · January 1, 2017
Young children are extremely motivated to help others, but it is not clear whether they do so in anonymous situations without social recognition. In two studies, we found that 18-month-old toddlers provided help equally in situations where an adult recipie ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2017
The crucial middle step consists in second-personal engagement with engagement others. In this chapter, the authors present face-to-face interactions joint intentionality. On the other hand there are capacities for acting collectively within a social group ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · November 2016
Guilt serves vital prosocial functions: It motivates transgressors to make amends, thus restoring damaged relationships. Previous developmental research on guilt has not clearly distinguished it from sympathy for a victim or a tendency to repair damage in ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · November 2016
Children's instrumental helping has sometimes been interpreted as a desire to complete action sequences or to restore the physical order of things. Two-year-old children (n = 51) selectively retrieved for an adult the object he needed rather than one he di ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983) · November 2016
Recent evidence suggests that great apes can use the former location of an entity to communicate about it. In this study we built on these findings to investigate the social-cognitive foundations of great apes' communicative abilities. We tested whether gr ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · November 2016
De Villiers (Lingua, 2007, Vol. 117, pp. 1858-1878) and others have claimed that children come to understand false belief as they acquire linguistic constructions for representing a proposition and the speaker's epistemic attitude toward that proposition. ...
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Journal ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.) · October 2016
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Humans operate with a "theory of mind" with which they are able to understand that others' actions are driven not by reality but by beliefs about reality, even when those beliefs are false. Although great apes share with humans many social-cognitive skills ...
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Journal ArticlePsychological science · October 2016
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Human social life depends heavily on social norms that prescribe and proscribe specific actions. Typically, young children learn social norms from adult instruction. In the work reported here, we showed that this is not the whole story: Three-year-old chil ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · October 1, 2016
This study investigated whether young children accept responsibility for the negative actions of ingroup members. Five-year-old children watched a transgressor break someone else's valued possession. Depending on condition, this transgressor either belonge ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · October 2016
From an early age, children can talk meaningfully about differences between moral and conventional norms. But does their understanding of these differences manifest itself in their actual behavioral and emotional reactions to norm violations? And do childr ...
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Journal ArticleThe British journal of developmental psychology · September 2016
Providing evaluative information to others about absent third parties helps them to identify cooperators and avoid cheaters. Here, we show that 5-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, reliably engage in such prosocial gossip. In an experimental setting, 5-year-o ...
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Journal ArticleCognition · August 2016
Large-scale human cooperation among unrelated individuals requires the enforcement of social norms. However, such enforcement poses a problem because non-enforcers can free ride on others' costly and risky enforcement. One solution is that enforcers receiv ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · July 1, 2016
Children must sometimes decide between conforming to peer behavior and doing what is right. While research shows that children have a strong inclination to act prosocially and to help conspecifics in need, many studies also demonstrate that children tend t ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · July 2016
Two studies investigated the influence of external rewards and social praise in young children's fairness-related behavior. The motivation of ninety-six 3-year-olds' to equalize unfair resource allocations was measured in three scenarios (collaboration, wi ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · June 1, 2016
The snowdrift game is a model for studying social coordination in the context of competing interests. We presented pairs of chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, with a situation in which they could either pull a weighted tray together or pull alone to obtain food ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · May 2016
Young children can in principle make generic inferences (e.g., "doffels are magnetic") on the basis of their own individual experience. Recent evidence, however, shows that by 4 years of age children make strong generic inferences on the basis of a single ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · May 2016
Some problems of resource distribution can be solved on equal terms only by taking turns. We presented such a problem to 168 pairs of 5- to 10-year-old children from one Western and two non-Western societies (German, Samburu, Kikuyu). Almost all German pai ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · May 2016
M. Tomasello, A. Kruger, and H. Ratner (1993) proposed a theory of cultural learning comprising imitative learning, instructed learning, and collaborative learning. Empirical and theoretical advances in the past 20 years suggest modifications to the theory ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal cognition · May 2016
Although chimpanzees understand what others may see, it is unclear whether they understand how others see things (Level 2 perspective-taking). We investigated whether chimpanzees can predict the behavior of a conspecific which is holding a mistaken perspec ...
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Chapter · April 25, 2016
Both cross-linguistic priming methodologies and research on codemixed utterances have been concerned with the nature of the underlying syntactic representations of bilinguals. The present paper investigated code-mixing at the morphosyntactic level (NP) by ...
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Journal ArticleLanguage Learning and Development · April 2, 2016
ABSTRACT: Children and adults follow cues such as case marking and word order in their assignment of semantic roles in simple transitives (e.g., the dog chased the cat). It has been suggested that the same cues are used for the interpretation of complex se ...
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Journal ArticleCurrent Opinion in Psychology · April 1, 2016
All primates engage in one or another form of social learning. Humans engage in cultural learning. From very early in ontogeny human infants and young children do not just learn useful things from others, they conform to others in order to affiliate with t ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · March 2016
Human institutional practices often involve competition within a cooperative structure of mutually accepted rules. In a competitive game, for instance, we not only expect adherence to the rules of the game but also expect an opponent who tries to win and, ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · March 2016
Human cultural groups value conformity to arbitrary norms (e.g., rituals, games) that are the result of collective "agreement." Ninety-six 3-year-olds had the opportunity to agree upon arbitrary norms with puppets. Results revealed that children normativel ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · March 2016
In the context of joint decision-making, we investigated whether preschoolers alter the informativeness of their justifications depending on the common ground that they share with their partner. Pairs of 3- and 5-year-olds (N = 146) were introduced to a no ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · February 2016
Iconic gestures-communicative acts using hand or body movements that resemble their referent-figure prominently in theories of language evolution and development. This study contrasted the abilities of chimpanzees (N=11) and 4-year-old human children (N=24 ...
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Book · January 4, 2016
Featured Publication
Michael Tomasello offers the most detailed account to date of the evolution of human moral psychology. ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · January 1, 2016
Recent research on distributive justice suggests that young children prefer equal distributions. But sometimes unequal distributions are justified, such as when some individuals deserve more than others based on merit, need, or agreed-upon rules. When and ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2016
Recent research has found that even preschoolers give more resources to others who have previously given resources to them, but the psychological bases of this reciprocity are unknown. In our study, a puppet distributed resources between herself and a chil ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Social Ontology · January 1, 2016
A précis of Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Thinking (Harvard University Press, 2014). ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2016
To acquire competence with a natural language, young children must master the grammatical constructions of their language(s). In this article we outline the main theoretical issues in the field and trace the developmental path children follow from talking ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Social Ontology · January 1, 2016
This paper is a reply to the comments by Henrike Moll, Glenda Satne, Ladislav Koreň and Michael Schmitz on Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Thinking (Harvard University Press, 2014). ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2016
To date, developmental research on groups has focused mainly on in-group biases and intergroup relations. However, little is known about children's general understanding of social groups and their perceptions of different forms of group. In this study, 5- ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal cognition · January 2016
Animals react in many different ways to being watched by others. In the context of cooperation, many theories emphasize reputational effects: Individuals should cooperate more if other potential cooperators are watching. In the context of competition, indi ...
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Journal ArticleCognition · December 2015
There is currently debate about the extent to which non-linguistic beings such as human infants and great apes are capable of absent reference. In a series of experiments we investigated the flexibility and specificity of great apes' (N=36) and 12 month-ol ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · December 2015
Young children are often considered "selfish" with resources because they are reluctant to give up things already in their possession (e.g., as in dictator games). In the current two studies, we presented pairs of 18- and 24-month-old toddlers with various ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · December 2015
When it is not possible to distribute resources equitably to everyone, people look for an equitable or just procedure. In the current study, we investigated young children's sense of procedural justice. We tested 32 triads of 5-year-olds in a new resource ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · November 2015
Human beings have remarkable skills of self-control, but the evolutionary origins of these skills are unknown. Here we compare children at 3 and 6 years of age with one of humans' two nearest relatives, chimpanzees, on a battery of reactivity and self-cont ...
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Journal ArticleThe British journal of developmental psychology · November 2015
Young children understand pedagogical demonstrations as conveying generic, kind-relevant information. But, in some contexts, they also see almost any confident, intentional action on a novel artefact as normative and thus generic, regardless of whether thi ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · November 2015
Recent theoretical work has highlighted potential links between interpersonal collaboration and group membership in the evolution of human sociality. Here we compared the effects of collaboration and minimal-group membership on young children's prosocial b ...
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Journal ArticleThe American psychologist · November 2015
The APA Awards for Distinguished Scientific Contributions are presented to persons who, in the opinion of the Committee on Scientific Awards, have made distinguished theoretical or empirical contributions to basic research in psychology. One of the 2015 aw ...
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Journal ArticleLanguage Learning and Development · October 2, 2015
In all human cultures, people gesture iconically. However, the evolutionary basis of iconic gestures is unknown. In this study, chimpanzees and bonobos, and 2- and 3-year-old children, learned how to operate two apparatuses to get rewards. Then, at test, o ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal cognition · September 2015
Humans often strategically manipulate the informational access of others to their own advantage. Although chimpanzees know what others can and cannot see, it is unclear whether they can strategically manipulate others' visual access. In this study, chimpan ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of child language · September 2015
We investigated whether children at the ages of two and three years understand that a speaker's use of the definite article specifies a referent that is in common ground between speaker and listener. An experimenter and a child engaged in joint actions in ...
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Journal ArticleInfancy · September 1, 2015
We provide an analysis of holdout and giving (Ho&G) behaviours in prelinguistic infants and investigate their relationship with index finger pointing. The frequency of Ho&Gs at 10 and 11 months along with the length of the following social interaction corr ...
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Journal ArticleFrontiers in Psychology · August 11, 2015
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 k ...
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Journal ArticlePsychological science · August 2015
Distributing the spoils of a joint enterprise on the basis of work contribution or relative productivity seems natural to the modern Western mind. But such notions of merit-based distributive justice may be culturally constructed norms that vary with the s ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive science · August 2015
Productivity is a central concept in the study of language and language acquisition. As a test case for exploring the notion of productivity, we focus on the noun slots of verb frames, such as __want__, __see__, and __get__. We develop a novel combination ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983) · August 2015
Humans often must coordinate co-occurring activities, and their flexible skills for doing so would seem to be uniquely powerful. In 2 studies, we compared 4- and 5-year-old children and one of humans' nearest relatives, chimpanzees, in their ability to foc ...
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Journal ArticleFrontiers in Psychology · July 9, 2015
A central challenge of investigating the underlying mechanisms of and the individual differences in young children’s behavior is the measurement of the internal physiological mechanism and the involved expressive emotions. Here, we illustrate two paradigms ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · July 1, 2015
In two experiments, we investigated whether chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, can use self-experience to infer what another sees. Subjects first gained self-experience with the visual properties of an object (either opaque or see-through). In a subsequent test ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · July 2015
Children use normative language in two key contexts: when teaching others and when enforcing social norms. We presented pairs of 3- and 5-year-old peers (N=192) with a sorting game in two experimental conditions (in addition to a third baseline condition). ...
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Journal ArticleChild Development · July 1, 2015
Western preschool children often assign ownership based on first possession and some theorists have proposed that this judgment might be an early emerging, innate bias. Five- to 9-year-olds (n = 112) from a small-scale group in Kenya (Kikuyu) watched video ...
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Journal ArticleCurrent biology : CB · June 2015
An important, and perhaps uniquely human, mechanism for maintaining cooperation against free riders is third-party punishment. Our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, will not punish third parties even though they will do so when personally affected. Un ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · May 2015
Humans are routinely required to coordinate with others. When communication is not possible, adults often achieve this by using salient cues in the environment (e.g. going to the Eiffel Tower, as an obvious meeting point). To explore the development of thi ...
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Journal ArticleLanguage Learning and Development · April 3, 2015
In the current study we investigate whether 2- and 3-year-old German children use intonation productively to mark the informational status of referents. Using a story-telling task, we compared children’s and adults’ intonational realization via pitch accen ...
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Journal ArticlePsychological science · April 2015
Much research in social psychology has shown that otherwise helpful people often fail to help when bystanders are present. Research in developmental psychology has shown that even very young children help and that the presence of others can actually increa ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · March 2015
Infants can see someone pointing to one of two buckets and infer that the toy they are seeking is hidden inside. Great apes do not succeed in this task, but, surprisingly, domestic dogs do. However, whether children and dogs understand these communicative ...
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Journal ArticleThe British journal of developmental psychology · March 2015
Humans are constantly required to coordinate their behaviour with others. As this often relies on everyone's convergence on the same strategy (e.g., driving on the left side of the road), a common solution is to conform to majority behaviour. In this study ...
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Journal ArticleCognition · March 2015
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.g., to inform that a searched-for toy is inside; see Behn ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · February 2015
Property as a social "agreement" comprises both a communicative component, in which someone makes a claim that she is entitled to some piece of property, and a cooperative component, in which others in the community respect that claim as legitimate. In the ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · February 2015
Many of humans' most important social interactions rely on trust, including most notably among strangers. But little is known about the evolutionary roots of human trust. We presented chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) with a modified version of the human trust ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · January 2015
Numerous studies have investigated children's abilities to attribute mental states, but few have examined their ability to recruit these abilities in social interactions. Here, 6-year-olds (N = 104) were tested on whether they can use first- and second-ord ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2015
Orang-utans played a communication game in two studies testing their ability to produce and comprehend requestive pointing. While the 'communicator' could see but not obtain hidden food, the 'donor' could release the food to the communicator, but could not ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2015
In face-to-face bargaining tasks human adults almost always agree on an equal split of resources. This is due to mutually recognized fairness and equality norms. Early developmental studies on sharing and equality norms found that egalitarian allocations o ...
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Journal ArticlePsychological science · December 2014
All primates learn things from conspecifics socially, but it is not clear whether they conform to the behavior of these conspecifics--if conformity is defined as overriding individually acquired behavioral tendencies in order to copy peers' behavior. In th ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · December 2014
Much of human cooperation takes place in mutualistic contexts in which the main challenge for individuals is how to coordinate decisions. In the current studies, we compared the abilities of chimpanzees and young children to coordinate with a partner in tw ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983) · November 2014
Nonhuman great apes and human children were tested for an understanding that appearance does not always correspond to reality. Subjects were 29 great apes (bonobos [Pan paniscus], chimpanzees [Pan troglodytes], gorillas [Gorilla gorilla], and orangutans [P ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · October 2014
In 2 studies, we investigated how peers establish a referential pact to call something, for example, a cushion versus a pillow (both equally felicitous). In Study 1, pairs of 4- and 6-year-old German-speaking peers established a referential pact for an art ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · October 1, 2014
Reasoning with a peer to make a joint decision involves making a proposal (e.g., "Polar bears go here") and justifying it with relevant facts (e.g., "This is ice") based on common ground assumptions or warrants (e.g., polar bears need ice). Twenty-four dya ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · October 2014
Although many animal species show at least some evidence of cultural transmission, broadly defined, only humans show clear evidence of cumulative culture. In the current study, we investigated whether young children show the "ratchet effect," an important ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983) · August 2014
Chimpanzees cooperate in a variety of contexts, but communicating to influence and regulate cooperative activities is rare. It is unclear whether this reflects chimpanzees' general inability or whether they have found other means to coordinate cooperative ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · August 2014
Much is known about young children's use of deictic gestures such as pointing. Much less is known about their use of other types of communicative gestures, especially iconic or symbolic gestures. In particular, it is unknown whether children can create ico ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · August 2014
Although a fair amount is known about young children's production of negation, little is known about their comprehension. Here, we focus on arguably the most complex basic form, denial, and how young children understand denial, when it is expressed in resp ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · June 2014
Symbiotic interactions are ubiquitous in nature and play a major role in driving the evolution of life. Interactions between partners are often mediated by shared signalling pathways, which strongly influence both partners' biology and the evolution of the ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · May 2014
This study investigates how children negotiate social norms with peers. In Study 1, 48 pairs of 3- and 5-year-olds (N = 96) and in Study 2, 48 pairs of 5- and 7-year-olds (N = 96) were presented with sorting tasks with conflicting instructions (one child b ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of child language · May 2014
In many of the world's languages grammatical aspect is used to indicate how events unfold over time. In English, activities that are ongoing can be distinguished from those that are completed using the morphological marker -ing. Using naturalistic observat ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychobiology · April 2014
There is very little research comparing great ape and human cognition developmentally. In the current studies we compared a cross-sectional sample of 2- to 4-year-old human children (n=48) with a large sample of chimpanzees and bonobos in the same age rang ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · March 2014
This study investigated how great apes and human infants use imperative pointing to request objects. In a series of three experiments (infants, N = 44; apes, N = 12), subjects were given the opportunity to either point to a desired object from a distance o ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · March 2014
Recent studies suggest that infants understand that others can have false beliefs. However, most of these studies have used looking time measures, and the few that have used behavioral measures are all based on the change-of-location paradigm, leading to c ...
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Book · February 2014
Featured Publication
Tool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. In this much-anticipated book, Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comp ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Semantics · February 1, 2014
Discourse particles typically express the attitudes of interlocutors with respect to the propositional content of an utterance - for example, marking whether or not a speaker believes the content of the proposition that she uttered. In German, the particle ...
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Journal ArticleEuropean Journal of Social Psychology · January 1, 2014
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In evolutionary perspective, what is most remarkable about human sociality is its many and diverse forms of cooperation. Here, I provide an overview of some recent research, mostly from our laboratory, comparing human children with their nearest living rel ...
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Book · January 1, 2014
From the point of view of psychology and cognitive science, much of modern linguistics is too formal and mathematical to be of much use. The New Psychology of Language volumes broke new ground by introducing functional and cognitive approaches to language ...
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Book · January 1, 2014
From the point of view of psychology and cognitive science, much of modern linguistics is too formal and mathematical to be of much use. The New Psychology of Language volumes broke new ground by introducing functional and cognitive approaches to language ...
Cite
Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · January 1, 2014
Social eavesdropping is the gathering of information by observing interactions between other individuals. Previous studies have claimed that dogs, Canis familiaris, are able to use information obtained via social eavesdropping, that is, preferring a genero ...
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Journal ArticleFrontiers in Psychology · January 1, 2014
Despite the benefits of cooperation, selfish individuals often produce outcomes where everyone is worse off. This "tragedy of the commons" has been demonstrated experimentally in adults with the public goods game. Contributions to a public good decline ove ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2014
Recent studies have raised the question of whether dogs, like human infants, comprehend an established rule as generalizable, normative knowledge or rather as episodic information, existing only in the immediate situation. In the current study we tested wh ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · January 1, 2014
One important component of collaborative problem solving is the ability to plan one's own action in relation to that of a partner. We presented 3- and 5-year-old peer pairs with two different tool choice situations in which they had to choose complementary ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2014
Some domestic dogs learn to comprehend human words, although the nature and basis of this learning is unknown. In the studies presented here we investigated whether dogs learn words through an understanding of referential actions by humans rather than simp ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2014
Prosocial behaviours such as helping, comforting, or sharing are central to human social life. Because they emerge early in ontogeny, it has been proposed that humans are prosocial by nature and that from early on empathy and sympathy motivate such behavio ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · January 1, 2014
Children's lives are governed by social norms. Since Piaget, however, it has been assumed that they understand very little about how norms work. Recent studies in which children enforce social norms indicate a richer understanding, but children are still r ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Cognition and Development · January 1, 2014
Recent studies have established that even infants can determine what others know based on previous visual experience. In the current study, we investigated whether 2- and 3-year-olds know what others know based on previous auditory experience. A child and ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive science · January 2014
Many studies show a developmental advantage for transitive sentences with familiar verbs over those with novel verbs. It might be that once familiar verbs become entrenched in particular constructions, they would be more difficult to understand (than would ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · January 2014
The present study investigated young preschoolers' proportional allocation of rewards in 2 different work contexts. We presented 32 pairs of 3.5-year-old peers with a collaborative task to obtain rewards by pulling ropes. In order to establish differences ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · December 2013
In 3 studies we explored when 3-year-olds would imitate novel words in utterances produced by adult speakers. Child and experimenter took turns in requesting objects from a game master. The experimenter always went first and always preceded the object's fa ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · December 2013
Human social life is structured by social norms creating both obligations and entitlements. Recent research has found that young children enforce simple obligations against norm violators by protesting. It is not known, however, whether they understand ent ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · November 2013
Human cooperative communication involves both an informative intention that the recipient understands the content of the signal and also a (Gricean) communicative intention that the recipient recognizes that the speaker has an informative intention. The de ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · November 2013
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 request ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · November 2013
Human cooperation depends on individuals caring about their reputation, and so they sometimes attempt to manage them strategically. Here we show that even 5-year-old children strategically manage their reputation. In an experimental setting, children share ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · October 2013
In studies of children's resource distribution, it is almost always the case that "fair" means an equal amount for all. In the mini-ultimatum game, players are confronted with situations in which fair does not always mean equal, and so the recipient of an ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · October 2013
Contingent reciprocity is important in theories of the evolution of human cooperation, but it has been very little studied in ontogeny. We gave 2- and 3-year-old children the opportunity to either help or share with a partner after that partner either had ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · October 1, 2013
Cultural transmission, by definition, involves some form of social learning. Chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates clearly engage in some forms of social learning enabling some types of cultural transmission, but there is controversy about whether they c ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · September 2013
Most previous research on imitation in infancy has focused on infants' learning of instrumental actions on objects. This study focused instead on the more social side of imitation, testing whether being mimicked increases prosocial behavior in infants, as ...
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Journal ArticleEuropean Journal of Developmental Psychology · September 1, 2013
This study assessed the role of non-verbal communication in 4-year-old children's decisions to coordinate with others. During a "Stag Hunt" game, the child and an adult individually and continually collected low-value prizes (hares). Occasionally, an alter ...
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Journal ArticleApplied Psycholinguistics · July 25, 2013
This paper investigates discourse effects on the provision of both subjects and objects and investigates whether pragmatic discourse features govern the realization/omission of both constituents alike. In an elicitation study, we examined how the discourse ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal cognition · July 2013
Great apes communicate with gestures in flexible ways. Based on several lines of evidence, Tomasello and colleagues have posited that many of these gestures are learned via ontogenetic ritualization-a process of mutual anticipation in which particular soci ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Linguistics · July 1, 2013
We investigated whether children (3- and 4-year-olds) and adults can use the active passive alternation - essentially a choice of subject - in a way that is consistent with the eye-gaze of the speaker. Previous work suggests the function of the subject pos ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · June 2013
Three-year-old children saw an adult displaying the exact same distress in 3 different conditions: (a) the adult's distress was appropriate to a genuine harm, (b) the adult's distress was an overreaction to a minor inconvenience, and (c) there was no appar ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of child language · June 2013
In this article we report two studies: a detailed longitudinal analysis of errors in wh-questions from six German-learning children (age 2 ; 0-3 ; 0) and an analysis of the prosodic characteristics of wh-questions in German child-directed speech. The resul ...
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Journal ArticleInteraction Studies · May 13, 2013
The communicative interactions of very young children almost always involve language (based on conventions), gesture (based on bodily deixis or iconicity) and directed gaze. In this study, ninety-six children (3;0 years) were asked to determine the locatio ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal cognition · May 2013
A number of studies have shown that dogs are sensitive to a human's perspective, but it remains unclear whether they use an egocentric strategy to assess what humans perceive. We investigated whether dogs know what a human can see and hear, even when the d ...
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Journal ArticleInfancy · May 1, 2013
Young children begin helping others with simple instrumental problems from soon after their first birthdays. In previous observations of this phenomenon, both naturalistic and experimental, children's parents were in the room and could potentially have inf ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal cognition · May 2013
All current evidence of visual perspective taking in dogs can possibly be explained by dogs reacting to certain stimuli rather than understanding what others see. In the current study, we set up a situation in which contextual information and social cues a ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal cognition · May 2013
Domestic dogs comprehend human gestural communication flexibly, particularly the pointing gesture. Here, we examine whether dogs interpret pointing informatively, that is, as simply providing information, or rather as a command, for example, ordering them ...
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Journal ArticleBiology letters · April 2013
Many animal species cooperate, but the underlying proximate mechanisms are often unclear. We presented chimpanzees with a mutualistic collaborative food-retrieval task requiring complementary roles, and tested subjects' ability to help their partner perfor ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · April 2013
Recent evidence suggests that 3-year-olds can take other people's visual perspectives not only when they perceive different things (Level 1) but even when they see the same thing differently (Level 2). One hypothesis is that 3-year-olds are good perspectiv ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal cognition · March 2013
Cooperative hunting is a cognitively challenging activity since individuals have to coordinate movements with a partner and at the same time react to the prey. Domestic dogs evolved from wolves, who engage in cooperative hunting regularly, but it is not cl ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of child language · March 2013
Young children answer many questions every day. The extent to which they do this in an adult-like way - following Grice's Maxim of Quantity by providing the requested information, no more no less - has been studied very little. In an experiment, we found t ...
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Journal ArticleThe British journal of developmental psychology · March 2013
Human social interaction depends on individuals identifying the common ground they have with others, based both on personally shared experiences and on cultural common ground that all members of the group share. We introduced 3- and 5-year-old children to ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · February 2013
Recent studies have shown that in situations where resources have been acquired collaboratively, children at around 3 years of age share mostly equally. We investigated 3-year-olds' sharing behavior with a collaborating partner and a free-riding partner wh ...
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Journal ArticleBiology letters · February 2013
The ability to predict how another individual will behave is useful in social competition. Chimpanzees can predict the behaviour of another based on what they observe her to see, hear, know and infer. Here we show that chimpanzees act on the assumption tha ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983) · February 2013
Humans make decisions about when and with whom to cooperate based on their reputations. People either learn about others by direct interaction or by observing third-party interactions or gossip. An important question is whether other animal species, especi ...
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Journal ArticleAnnual Review of Psychology · January 1, 2013
Featured Publication
From an evolutionary perspective, morality is a form of cooperation. Cooperation requires individuals either to suppress their own self-interest or to equate it with that of others. We review recent research on the origins of human morality, both phylogene ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2013
The seminal work in the modern study of children’s moral development is Piaget’s (1932/1997) The Moral Judgment of the Child. As is well known, Piaget claimed that before the age of 8 or 9 years children make moral judgments based only on a respect for aut ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2013
Here we investigate the extent of children's understanding of the joint commitments inherent in joint activities. Three-year-old children either made a joint commitment to assemble a puzzle with a puppet partner, or else the child and puppet each assembled ...
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Journal ArticleInfancy · January 1, 2013
Young children routinely behave prosocially, but what is their motivation for doing so? Here, we review three studies which show that young children (1) are intrinsically motivated rather than motivated by extrinsic rewards; (2) are more inclined to help t ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · January 1, 2013
Many primates share food, but the motives behind this food sharing are mostly not known. We investigated individuals' preference to feed either alone or together with a tolerant partner. Subjects (chimpanzees who are highly competitive around food, bonobos ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal cognition · January 2013
Although many studies have investigated domestic dogs' (Canis familiaris) use of human communicative cues, little is known about their use of humans' emotional expressions. We conducted a study following the general paradigm of Repacholi in Dev Psychol 34: ...
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ConferenceCooperative Minds: Social Interaction and Group Dynamics - Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2013 · January 1, 2013Cite
ConferenceCooperative Minds: Social Interaction and Group Dynamics - Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2013 · January 1, 2013Cite
Journal ArticleCurrent Anthropology · December 1, 2012
Modern theories of the evolution of human cooperation focus mainly on altruism. In contrast, we propose that humans' species-unique forms of cooperation-as well as their species-unique forms of cognition, communication, and social life-all derive from mutu ...
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Journal ArticleBiology letters · December 2012
Humans, but not chimpanzees, punish unfair offers in ultimatum games, suggesting that fairness concerns evolved sometime after the split between the lineages that gave rise to Homo and Pan. However, nothing is known about fairness concerns in the other Pan ...
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Journal ArticleTrends in cognitive sciences · December 2012
Are people more likely to be cooperative if they must act quickly or if they have more time to mull it over? The results of a recent series of studies suggest that peoples' initial impulse is to cooperate, but that with more time and reflection they become ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · December 2012
We presented small groups of chimpanzees with two collective action situations, in which action was necessary for reward but there was a disincentive for individuals to act owing to the possibility of free-riding on the efforts of others. We found that in ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · November 2012
Despite its importance in the development of children's skills of social cognition and communication, very little is known about the ontogenetic origins of the pointing gesture. We report a training study in which mothers gave children one month of extra d ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal cognition · November 2012
In previous studies claiming to demonstrate that great apes understand the goals of others, the apes could potentially have been using subtle behavioral cues present during the test to succeed. In the current studies, we ruled out the use of such cues by m ...
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Chapter · September 18, 2012
This article reviews some of the best-known and most interesting work on language acquisition from within the framework of functional-cognitive linguistics, particularly those on meaning and conceptualization as well as usage and grammar (grammatical const ...
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Chapter · September 18, 2012
This article suggests that the ontogenesis of shared intentionality depends on the developmentally primitive phenomenon of 'joint attention'. This is the ability of the infant to understand that they and other individuals can attend to the same object and ...
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Journal ArticlePsychological science · September 2012
Young children help other people, but it is not clear why. In the current study, we found that 2-year-old children's sympathetic arousal, as measured by relative changes in pupil dilation, is similar when they themselves help a person and when they see tha ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · September 2012
Punishment can help maintain cooperation by deterring free-riding and cheating. Of particular importance in large-scale human societies is third-party punishment in which individuals punish a transgressor or norm violator even when they themselves are not ...
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Journal ArticleCognition · September 2012
To become cooperative members of their cultural groups, developing children must follow their group's social norms. But young children are not just blind norm followers, they are also active norm enforcers, for example, protesting and correcting when someo ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive science · September 2012
This paper investigates whether an abstract linguistic construction shows the kind of prototype effects characteristic of non-linguistic categories, in both adults and young children. Adapting the prototype-plus-distortion methodology of Franks and Bransfo ...
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Journal ArticleThe British journal of developmental psychology · September 2012
This study explored whether infants aged 12 months already recognize the communicative function of pointing gestures. Infants participated in a task requiring them to comprehend an adult's informative pointing gesture to the location of a hidden toy. They ...
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Journal ArticleCurrent Directions in Psychological Science · August 1, 2012
Social norms have played a key role in the evolution of human cooperation, serving to stabilize prosocial and egalitarian behavior despite the self-serving motives of individuals. Young children's behavior mostly conforms to social norms, as they follow ad ...
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Journal ArticleFirst Language · August 1, 2012
The prototypical word learning situation in western, middle-class cultures is dyadic: an adult addresses a child directly, ideally in a manner sensitive to their current focus of attention. But young children also seem to learn many of their words in polya ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · July 2012
Young children struggle in the classic tests of appearance versus reality. In the current Study 1, 3-year-olds had to determine which of 2 objects (a deceptive or a nondeceptive one) an adult requested when asking for the "real X" versus "the one that look ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal cognition · July 2012
Two word-trained dogs were presented with acts of reference in which a human pointed, named objects, or simultaneously did both. The question was whether these dogs would assume co-reference of pointing and naming and thus pick the pointed-to object. Resul ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · April 1, 2012
We compared the performance of 3- and 5-year-old children with that of chimpanzees in two tasks requiring collaboration via complementary roles. In both tasks, children and chimpanzees were able to coordinate two complementary roles with peers and solve th ...
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Journal ArticleCurrent biology : CB · April 2012
Cultural transmission is a key component of human evolution. Two of humans' closest living relatives, chimpanzees and orangutans, have also been argued to transmit behavioral traditions across generations culturally [1-3], but how much the process might re ...
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Journal ArticleTopics in cognitive science · April 2012
Children often refer to things ambiguously but learn not to from responding to clarification requests. We review and explore this learning process here. In Study 1, eighty-four 2- and 4-year-olds were tested for their ability to request stickers from eithe ...
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Chapter · March 22, 2012
This chapter examines the distinction between two approaches in interpreting the behaviour in non-human animals. It explains the 'boosters' interpret behaviour in psychologically rich ways while 'scoffers' prefer psychologically lean interpretations. It co ...
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Chapter · March 22, 2012
This chapter explores the early stages of pragmatic language acquisition before taking up the issue of syntax and semantics. It suggests that the relation between language and theory of mind is different depending on which aspect of social understanding is ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · March 2012
Domestic dogs comprehend human gestural communication in a way that other animal species do not. But little is known about the specific cues they use to determine when human communication is intended for them. In a series of four studies, we confronted bot ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Linguistics · February 1, 2012
In this study, we test a number of predictions concerning children's knowledge of the transitive Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) construction between two and three years on one child (Thomas) for whom we have densely collected data. The data show that the earlie ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2012
Reputation formation is a key component in the social interactions of many animal species. An evaluation of reputation is drawn from two principal sources: direct experience of an individual and indirect experience from observing that individual interactin ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2012
We compared 24-month-old children's learning when their exposure to words came either in an interactive (coupled) context or in a nonsocial (decoupled) context. We measured the children's learning with two different methods: one in which they were asked to ...
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Journal ArticlePsychological science · January 2012
We investigated 1-year-old infants' ability to infer an adult's focus of attention solely on the basis of her voice direction. In Studies 1 and 2, 12- and 16-month-olds watched an adult go behind a barrier and then heard her verbally express excitement abo ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2012
Virtually all theories of the evolution of cooperation require that cooperators find ways to interact with one another selectively, to the exclusion of cheaters. This means that individuals must make reputational judgments about others as cooperators, base ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2012
BackgroundSocial learning research in apes has focused on social learning in the technical (problem solving) domain - an approach that confounds action and physical information. Successful subjects in such studies may have been able to perform tar ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2012
Chimpanzees routinely follow the gaze of humans to outside targets. However, in most studies using object choice they fail to use communicative gestures (e.g. pointing) to find hidden food. Chimpanzees' failure to do this may be due to several difficulties ...
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Journal ArticleQuarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · January 2012
Humans accomplish much of what they do in collaboration with others. In ontogeny, children's earliest abilities to collaborate develop in two basic steps. First, 1- and 2-year-olds learn to form with others joint goals and joint attention--which include an ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · January 2012
Some children's social activities are structured by joint goals. In previous research, the criterion used to determine this was relatively weak: if the partner stopped interacting, did the child attempt to re-engage her? But re-engagement attempts could ea ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · January 2012
This study investigated young children's commitment to a joint goal by assessing whether peers in collaborative activities continue to collaborate until all received their rewards. Forty-eight 2.5- and 3.5-year-old children worked on an apparatus dyadicall ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of child language · January 2012
Children are frequently confronted with so-called 'test questions'. While genuine questions are requests for missing information, test questions ask for information obviously already known to the questioner. In this study we explored whether two-year-old c ...
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Journal ArticleScience · December 2, 2011
Laboratory studies of primate cognition face the problem that captive populations of a species are not always comparable, and generalizations to natural populations are never certain. Studies of primate cognition in the field face the problem that replicat ...
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Journal ArticleInternational Journal of Primatology · December 1, 2011
Group-living animals frequently face situations in which they must coordinate individual and sometimes conflicting goals. We assessed chimpanzees' ability to coordinate in a Stag Hunt game. Dyads were confronted with a situation in which each individual wa ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of child language · November 2011
The current study used a forced choice pointing paradigm to examine whether English children aged 2 ; 1 can use abstract knowledge of the relationship between word order position and semantic roles to make an active behavioural decision when interpreting a ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · November 2011
Both adults and adolescents often conform their behavior and opinions to peer groups, even when they themselves know better. The current study investigated this phenomenon in 24 groups of 4 children between 4;2 and 4;9 years of age. Children often made the ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · November 1, 2011
Chimpanzees engage in a number of group activities, but it is still unclear to what extent they prefer mutualistic collaborative strategies over individual strategies to achieve their goals. In one experiment, we gave chimpanzees the choice between pulling ...
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Journal ArticleCognition · November 2011
The present work investigated young children's normative understanding of property rights using a novel methodology. Two- and 3-year-old children participated in situations in which an actor (1) took possession of an object for himself, and (2) attempted t ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · November 2011
The adaptive behavior of primates, including humans, is often mediated by temperament. Human behavior likely differs from that of other primates in part due to temperament. In the current study we compared the reaction of bonobos, chimpanzees, orangutans, ...
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Journal ArticleCurrent biology : CB · October 2011
Human societies are built on collaborative activities. Already from early childhood, human children are skillful and proficient collaborators. They recognize when they need help in solving a problem and actively recruit collaborators [1, 2]. The societies ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · October 1, 2011
Dogs are especially skilful at comprehending human communicative signals. This raises the question of whether they are also able to produce such signals flexibly, specifically, whether they helpfully produce indicative ('showing') behaviours to inform an i ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of child language · September 2011
Speakers often anticipate how recipients will interpret their utterances. If they wish some other, less obvious interpretation, they may 'mark' their utterance (e.g. with special intonations or facial expressions). We investigated whether two- and three-ye ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of child language · September 2011
Three- and four-year-old children were asked predicate-focus questions ('What's X doing?') about a scene in which an agent performed an action on a patient. We varied: (i) whether (or not) the preceding discourse context, which established the patient as g ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · September 2011
Displaying guilt after a transgression serves to appease the victim and other group members, restore interpersonal relationships, and indicate the transgressors' awareness of and desire to conform to the group's norms. We investigated whether and when youn ...
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Journal ArticleApplied Animal Behaviour Science · September 1, 2011
Chimpanzees find it easier to locate food when a human prohibits them from going to a certain location than when she indicates that location helpfully. Human children, in contrast, use the cooperative gesture more readily. The question here was whether dom ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · September 1, 2011
We investigated the hypothesis that patterns of chimpanzee food sharing are influenced by whether individuals contributed to its acquisition collaboratively. In two experiments we exposed pairs of captive chimpanzees to food acquisition/sharing situations ...
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Journal ArticleMonographs of the Society for Research in Child Development · August 2011
The influence of culture on cognitive development is well established for school age and older children. But almost nothing is known about how different parenting and socialization practices in different cultures affect infants' and young children's earlie ...
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Journal ArticleEthology · August 1, 2011
Recent studies have suggested that domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) engage in highly complex forms of social learning. Here, we critically assess the potential mechanisms underlying social learning in dogs using two problem-solving tasks. In a classical de ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive science · August 2011
Mintz (2003) found that in English child-directed speech, frequently occurring frames formed by linking the preceding (A) and succeeding (B) word (A_x_B) could accurately predict the syntactic category of the intervening word (x). This has been successfull ...
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Journal ArticleNature · July 2011
Humans actively share resources with one another to a much greater degree than do other great apes, and much human sharing is governed by social norms of fairness and equity. When in receipt of a windfall of resources, human children begin showing tendenci ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Linguistics · May 1, 2011
The development of abstract schemas and productive rules in language is affected by both token and type frequencies. High token frequencies and surface similarities help to discover formal and functional commonalities between utterances and categorize them ...
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Journal ArticleLanguage and Cognitive Processes · May 1, 2011
The two main models of children's acquisition of inflectional morphology-the Dual-Mechanism approach and the usage-based (schema-based) approach-have both been applied mainly to languages with fairly simple morphological systems. Here we report two studies ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Linguistics · May 1, 2011
Most studies examining children's understanding of transitive sentences focus on the morphosyntactic properties of the construction and ignore prosody. But adults use prosody in many different ways to interpret ambiguous sentences. In two studies we invest ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · May 2011
Young children interpret some acts performed by adults as normatively governed, that is, as capable of being performed either rightly or wrongly. In previous experiments, children have made this interpretation when adults introduced them to novel acts with ...
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Journal ArticleInfancy · May 1, 2011
Previous research has found that young children recognize an adult as being acquainted with an object most readily when the child and adult have previously engaged socially with that object together. In the current study, we tested the hypothesis that such ...
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Journal ArticleBilingualism · April 1, 2011
Previous research has reported that bilingual children sometimes produce mixed noun phrases with 'correct' gender agreement- A s in der dog (der being a masculine determiner in German and the German word for dog, hund, being masculine as well). However, th ...
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Journal ArticleThe British journal of developmental psychology · March 2011
We investigated children's moral behaviour in situations in which a third party was harmed (the test case for possession of agent-neutral moral norms). A 3-year-old and two puppets each created a picture or clay sculpture, after which one puppet left the r ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · February 2011
If chimpanzees are faced with two opaque boards on a table, in the context of searching for a single piece of food, they do not choose the board lying flat (because if food was under there it would not be lying flat) but, rather, they choose the slanted on ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · January 1, 2011
Range et al. (2007, Current Biology, 17, 868-872) found that dogs, Canis familiaris, copy others' means to achieve a goal more often when those means are the rational solution to a problem than when they are irrational. In our first experiment, we added a ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · January 2011
Domestic dogs are skillful at using the human pointing gesture. In this study we investigated whether dogs take contextual information into account when following pointing gestures, specifically, whether they follow human pointing gestures more readily in ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences · January 1, 2011
Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) sometimes help both humans and conspecifics in experimental situations in which immediate selfish benefits can be ruled out. However, in several experiments, chimpanzees have not provided food to a conspecific even when it wou ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · January 1, 2011
Little is known about the origins of the pointing gesture. We sought to gain insight into its emergence by investigating individual differences in the pointing of 12-month-old infants in two ways. First, we looked at differences in the communicative and in ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · January 2011
Both chimpanzees and human infants use the pointing gesture with human adults, but it is not clear if they are doing so for the same social motives. In two studies, we presented chimpanzees and human 25-month-olds with the opportunity to point for a hidden ...
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Journal ArticlePsychological Science · January 1, 2011
Egalitarian behavior is considered to be a species-typical component of human cooperation. Human adults tend to share resources equally, even if they have the opportunity to keep a larger portion for themselves. Recent experiments have suggested that this ...
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Chapter · December 24, 2010
Many animal species live in complex social groups, some of whom transmit information across generations "culturally". Humans' uniquely cultural way of life began with this kind of social organization but then acquired novel characteristics as a result of b ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Pragmatics · December 1, 2010
Human communication rests on a basic assumption of partner cooperativeness, including even requesting. In the current study, an adult made an ambiguous request for an object to 21-month-old infants, with one potential referent being right in front of her a ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · November 2010
Two studies investigated whether young children are selectively prosocial toward others, based on the others' moral behaviors. In Study 1 (N = 54), 3-year-olds watched 1 adult (the actor) harming or helping another adult. Children subsequently helped the h ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · November 2010
Infants intentionally communicate with others from before their 1st birthday. But there is some question about how they understand the communicative process. Do they understand that for their request to work the recipient must both understand the request a ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · November 1, 2010
Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, help others in a variety of contexts. Some researchers have claimed that this only occurs when food is not involved and the recipient actively solicits help. In the current study, however, we found that chimpanzees often helpe ...
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Journal ArticleThe British journal of developmental psychology · November 2010
Preschoolers' selective learning from adult versus peer models was investigated. Extending previous research, children from age 3 were shown to selectively learn simple rule games from adult rather than peer models. Furthermore, this selective learning was ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Pragmatics · November 1, 2010
From the very beginning of language acquisition, young children are sensitive to what is given versus what is new in their discourse with others. Here we ask whether 24-month-olds use this skill to interpret prosodic highlighting as an invitation to focus ...
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Journal ArticleCurrent Biology · October 26, 2010
Until fairly recently, young infants were thought to be as cognitively incompetent as they were morally innocent. They were epistemological 'tabulae rasae', helpless 'bundles of reflexes' who spent all of their time sleeping, crying and sucking. In the fam ...
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Chapter · September 1, 2010
Chimpanzees follow the gaze of conspecifics and humans -follow it past distractors and behind barriers, 'check back' with humans when gaze following does not yield interesting sights, use gestures appropriately depending on the visual access of their recip ...
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Journal ArticleInfancy · September 1, 2010
In this study, we asked whether 14- and 18-month-old infants use the experiences they have previously shared with others when deciding what to point to for them declaratively. After sharing a particular type of referent with an adult in an excited manner, ...
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Journal ArticleEvolution and Human Behavior · September 1, 2010
Humansw are the only primates that make music. But the evolutionary origins and functions of music are unclear. Given that in traditional cultures music making and dancing are often integral parts of important group ceremonies such as initiation rites, wed ...
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Journal ArticleLanguage · September 1, 2010
We investigate the development of word order in German children's spontaneous production of complement clauses. From soon after their second birthday, young German children use both verb-final complements with complementizers and verb-second complements wi ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · August 2010
While bonobos and chimpanzees are both genetically and behaviorally very similar, they also differ in significant ways. Bonobos are more cautious and socially tolerant while chimpanzees are more dependent on extractive foraging, which requires tools. The s ...
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Journal ArticleTopics in cognitive science · July 2010
As the cognitive revolution was slow to come to the study of animal behavior, the vast majority of what we know about primate cognition has been discovered in the last 30 years. Building on the recognition that the physical and social worlds of humans and ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · July 2010
Do young children form "referential pacts"? If a person has referred to an object with a certain term (e.g., the horse), will children expect this person to use this term in the future but allow others to use a different expression (e.g., the pony)? One hu ...
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Journal ArticleCurrent Directions in Psychological Science · June 25, 2010
Humans share the vast majority of their cognitive skills with other great apes. In addition, however, humans have also evolved a unique suite of cognitive skills and motivations-collectively referred to as shared intentionality-for living collaboratively, ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · May 2010
By three years of age, children are skilled at assessing under which circumstances others can see things. However, nothing is known about whether they can use this knowledge to guide their own deceptive behaviour. Here we investigated 3-year-olds' ability ...
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Journal ArticlePloS one · May 2010
BackgroundIt is still unclear which observational learning mechanisms underlie the transmission of difficult problem-solving skills in chimpanzees. In particular, two different mechanisms have been proposed: imitation and emulation. Previous studi ...
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Chapter · April 1, 2010
This chapter contains the authors' reactions to the previous chapters and stresses the similarities and differences between these theoretical views. It discusses that part of the debate concerns whether the first words are more like the indexical signs of ...
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Chapter · April 1, 2010
This chapter describes research findings from the social-pragmatic approach. It discusses that Nameera Akhtar and Michael Tomasello's dramatic findings demonstrate how word learning occurs in some fairly complex, nonostensive situations amid the flow of so ...
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Chapter · April 1, 2010
A current controversy in the study of word learning is whether it is conceptually easier to learn nouns as compared to verbs early in development. This chapter describes three experiments which address the noun-verb question in different ways. In the first ...
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Journal ArticleFirst Language · February 1, 2010
Lexically based learning and semantic analogy may both play a role in the learning of grammar. To investigate this, 5-year-old German children were trained on a miniature language (nominally English) involving two grammatical constructions, each of which w ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2010
This chapter emphasises the role of psychology in language evolution, but claims that it was the separate evolution of capacities for using symbols and grammar (that is, syntactic structure) that distinguishes human communication from the communication of ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2010
Human beings share many cognitive skills with their nearest primate relatives, especially those for dealing with the physical world of objects (and categories and quantities of objects) in space and their causal interrelations. But humans are, in addition, ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · January 2010
Adults refer young children's attention to things in two basic ways: through the use of pointing (and other deictic gestures) and words (and other linguistic conventions). In the current studies, we referred young children (2- and 4-year-olds) to things in ...
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Journal ArticleLanguage Sciences · January 1, 2010
Usage-based approaches to language acquisition argue that children acquire the grammar of their target language using general-cognitive learning principles. The current paper reports on an experiment that tested a central assumption of the usage-based appr ...
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Journal ArticleLanguage Learning and Development · January 1, 2010
Case marking in English in available only on some pronouns and only in some cases. It is unknown whether young children acquiring English nevertheless make use of this highly restricted marking as a cue to sentence interpretation. The current study therefo ...
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Journal ArticleApplied Psycholinguistics · January 1, 2010
In two studies we investigated 2-year-old children's answers to predicate-focus questions depending on the preceding context. Children were presented with a successive series of short video clips showing transitive actions (e.g., frog washing duck) in whic ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · January 1, 2010
Act-out and intermodal preferential looking (IPL) tasks were administered to 67 English children aged 2-0, 2-9 and 3-5 to assess their comprehension of canonical SVO transitive word order with both familiar and novel verbs. Children at 3-5 and at 2-9 showe ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2010
Animals can use punishment as a means to change the behavior of others. Punishment can be done for selfish ends with no regard for how the target of the act is affected. On the other extreme, it can benefit others in a society and be motivated by its effec ...
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Journal ArticlePsychological science · January 2010
Most studies of animal cognition focus on group performance and neglect individual differences and the correlational structure of cognitive abilities. Moreover, no previous studies have compared the correlational structure of cognitive abilities in nonhuma ...
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Journal ArticleCognition · November 2009
Young children use and comprehend different kinds of speech acts from the beginning of their communicative development. But it is not clear how they understand the conventional and normative structure of such speech acts. In particular, imperative speech a ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · November 2009
A key skill in early human development is the ability to comprehend communicative intentions as expressed in both nonlinguistic gestures and language. In the current studies, we confronted domestic dogs (some of whom knew many human 'words') with a task in ...
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Journal ArticleEvolution and Human Behavior · November 1, 2009
A crucially important aspect of human cooperation is the ability to negotiate to cooperative outcomes when interests over resources conflict. Although chimpanzees and other social species may negotiate conflicting interests regarding travel direction or ac ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · October 2009
Theories of grammatical development differ in how much abstract knowledge they attribute to young children. Here, we report a series of experiments using a computational model to evaluate the explanatory power of child grammars based not on abstract rules ...
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Journal ArticleBehavioral and Brain Sciences · October 1, 2009
The idea of a biologically evolved, universal grammar with linguistic content is a myth, perpetuated by three spurious explanatory strategies of generative linguists. To make progress in understanding human linguistic competence, cognitive scientists must ...
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Journal ArticleInteraction Studies · September 28, 2009
Recent research suggests that some human-like social skills evolved in dogs (Canis familiaris) during domestication as an incidental by-product of selection for "tame" forms of behavior. It is still possible, however, that the social skills of certain dog ...
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Journal ArticleTrends in cognitive sciences · September 2009
Recent empirical research has shed new light on the perennial question of human altruism. A number of recent studies suggest that from very early in ontogeny young children have a biological predisposition to help others achieve their goals, to share resou ...
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Journal ArticleCognition · September 2009
Many studies have established that children tend to exclude objects for which they already have a name as potential referents of novel words. In the current study we asked whether this exclusion can be triggered by social-pragmatic context alone without pr ...
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Journal ArticleCognition · September 2009
A milestone in human development is coming to recognize that how something looks is not necessarily how it is. We tested appearance-reality understanding in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) with a task requiring them to choose between a small grape and a big ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · September 2009
Although apes understand others' goals and perceptions, little is known about their understanding of others' emotional expressions. We conducted three studies following the general paradigm of Repacholi and colleagues (1997, 1998). In Study 1, a human reac ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · September 2009
When adults make a joint commitment to act together, they feel an obligation to their partner. In 2 studies, the authors investigated whether young children also understand joint commitments to act together. In the first study, when an adult orchestrated w ...
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Journal ArticleBritish journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · August 2009
Human infants as young as 14 to 18 months of age help others attain their goals, for example, by helping them to fetch out-of-reach objects or opening cabinets for them. They do this irrespective of any reward from adults (indeed external rewards undermine ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Linguistics · August 1, 2009
In numerous comprehension studies, across different languages, children have performed worse on object relatives (e.g., the dog that the cat chased) than on subject relatives (e.g., the dog that chased the cat). One possible reason for this is that the tes ...
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Journal ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · August 2009
Some researchers have claimed that chimpanzee and human culture rest on homologous cognitive and learning mechanisms. While clearly there are some homologous mechanisms, we argue here that there are some different mechanisms at work as well. Chimpanzee cul ...
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Journal ArticleCognition · August 2009
Recently, several studies have claimed that soon after their first birthday infants understand others' false beliefs. However, some have questioned these findings based on criticisms of the looking-time paradigms used. Here we report a new paradigm to test ...
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Journal ArticleFirst Language · August 1, 2009
Infinitival-to omission errors (e.g., *I want hold Postman Pat) are produced by many English-speaking children early in development. This article aims to explain these omissions by investigating the emergence of infinitival-to, and its production/omission ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Linguistics · August 1, 2009
This study tests accounts of co-reference errors whereby children allow "Mama Bear" and "her" to co-refer in sentences like "Mama Bear is washing her" (Chien and Wexler, Language Acquisition 1: 225-295, 1990). 63 children aged 4;6, 5;6 and 6;6 participated ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Linguistics · August 1, 2009
Children generate novel utterances from the outset of multiword speech. In this study, we apply a usage-based method called 'traceback' to the multiword utterances of four two-year-olds to see how closely related these utterances are to their previous utte ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · July 2009
A nonverbal false belief task was administered to children (mean age 5 years) and two great ape species: chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus). Because apes typically perform poorly in cooperative contexts, our task was competitive. Two ...
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Journal ArticleBehaviour · July 1, 2009
We investigated dogs' ability to take the visual perspective of humans. In the main study, each of two toys was placed on the dog's side of two small barriers (one opaque, one transparent). In experimental conditions, a human sat on the opposite side of th ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · July 2009
It has been repeatedly shown that when asked to identify a protagonist's false belief on the basis of his false statement, English-speaking 3-year-olds dismiss the statement and fail to attribute to him a false belief. In the present studies, we tested 3-y ...
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Journal ArticleThe British journal of developmental psychology · June 2009
This set of studies examined the ability of 3-year-olds to conceptualize multiple pretend identities with objects. Rather than relying on verbal response measures, as has been done in the past, children's creative and inferential pretend actions were used ...
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Journal ArticleThe British journal of developmental psychology · June 2009
We investigated young children's awareness of the context-relative rule structure of simple games. Two contexts were established in the form of spatial locations. Familiar objects were used in their conventional way at location 1, but acquired specific fun ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Linguistics · May 1, 2009
Cantonese-, German-, and English-speaking children aged 2;6, 3,6, and 4,6 acted out transitive sentences containing novel verbs in three conditions: (1) agent and patient were cued redundantly by both word order and animacy; (2) agent and patient were mark ...
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Journal ArticlePsychological science · May 2009
One of the defining features of human language is displacement, the ability to make reference to absent entities. Here we show that prelinguistic, 12-month-old infants already can use a nonverbal pointing gesture to make reference to absent entities. We al ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · April 1, 2009
In two studies 3-year-olds' understanding of the context-specificity of normative rules was investigated through games of pretend play. In the first study, children protested against a character who joined a pretend game but treated the target object accor ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · March 2009
In most research on the early ontogeny of sympathy, young children are presented with an overtly distressed person and their responses are observed. In the current study, the authors asked whether young children could also sympathize with a person to whom ...
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Journal ArticleAutism : the international journal of research and practice · March 2009
The goal of the current study was to examine the contribution of three early social skills that may provide a foundation for cooperative performance in autism: (1) imitation, (2) joint attention, and (3) understanding of other people's intentions regarding ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · March 2009
We investigated whether 1-year-old infants use their shared experience with an adult to determine the meaning of a pointing gesture. In the first study, after two adults had each shared a different activity with the infant, one of the adults pointed to a t ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology · March 2009
The human capacity to synchronize body movements to an external acoustic beat enables uniquely human behaviors such as music making and dancing. By hypothesis, these first evolved in human cultures as fundamentally social activities. We therefore hypothesi ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican journal of primatology · February 2009
Recent studies have produced mixed evidence about inequity aversion in nonhuman primates. Brosnan et al. [Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological Sciences 272:253-258, 2005] found inequity aversion in chimpanzees and argued that ef ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2009
Animals can use punishment as a means to change the behavior of others. Punishment can be done for selfish ends with no regard for how the target of the act is affected. On the other extreme, it can benefit others in a society and be motivated by its effec ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · January 1, 2009
We investigated whether infants comprehend others' nonverbal communicative intentions directed to a third person, in an 'overhearing' context. An experimenter addressed an assistant and indicated a hidden toy's location by either gazing ostensively or poin ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · January 1, 2009
We investigated preschoolers' selective learning from models that had previously appeared to be reliable or unreliable. Replicating previous research, children from 4 years selectively learned novel words from reliable over unreliable speakers. Extending p ...
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Journal ArticleCognition · November 2008
There is currently much controversy about which, if any, mental states chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates understand. In the current two studies we tested both chimpanzees' and human children's understanding of both knowledge-ignorance and false belie ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · November 2008
The current study investigated the influence of rewards on very young children's helping behavior. After 20-month-old infants received a material reward during a treatment phase, they subsequently were less likely to engage in further helping during a test ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983) · November 2008
Boesch (2007) criticizes research comparing ape and human cognition on the basis of both internal and external validity. The authors show here that most of those criticisms are not valid because: (i) most threats to internal validity (e.g., conspecific exp ...
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Journal ArticleCognition · September 2008
In the current study we investigated whether 12-month-old infants gesture appropriately for knowledgeable versus ignorant partners, in order to provide them with needed information. In two experiments we found that in response to a searching adult, 12-mont ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of child language · August 2008
Rapid acquisition of linguistic categories or constructions is sometimes regarded as evidence of innate knowledge. In this paper, we examine Polish children's early understanding of an idiosyncratic, language-specific construction involving the instrumenta ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · July 2008
Using a preferential looking methodology with novel verbs, Gertner, Fisher and Eisengart (2006) found that 21-month-old English children seemed to understand the syntactic marking of transitive word order in an abstract, verb-general way. In the current st ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · July 2008
Two comprehension experiments were conducted to investigate whether German children are able to use the grammatical cues of word order and word endings (case markers) to identify agents and patients in a causative sentence and whether they weigh these two ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican journal of primatology · June 2008
Mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) in Karisoke, Rwanda, feed on the stinging nettle Laportea alatipes by means of elaborate processing skills. Byrne [e.g. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 3 ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Systems Research · June 1, 2008
Human syntax acquisition involves a system that can learn constraints on possible word sequences in typologically-different human languages. Evaluation of computational syntax acquisition systems typically involves theory-specific or language-specific assu ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · May 2008
G. Gergely, H. Bekkering, and I. Király (2002) showed that 14-month-old infants imitate rationally, copying an adult's unusual action more often when it was freely chosen than when it was forced by some constraint. This suggests that infants understand oth ...
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Journal ArticleTrends in cognitive sciences · May 2008
On the 30th anniversary of Premack and Woodruff's seminal paper asking whether chimpanzees have a theory of mind, we review recent evidence that suggests in many respects they do, whereas in other respects they might not. Specifically, there is solid evide ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · May 2008
In two studies, the authors investigated 2- and 3-year-old children's awareness of the normative structure of conventional games. In the target conditions, an experimenter showed a child how to play a simple rule game. After the child and the experimenter ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of child language · May 2008
This paper investigates the development of relative clauses in the speech of one German-speaking child aged 2 ; 0 to 5 ; 0. The earliest relative clauses we found in the data occur in topicalization constructions that are only a little different from simpl ...
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Journal ArticleInfant behavior & development · April 2008
In the current study we investigated infants' communication in the visual and auditory modalities as a function of the recipient's visual attention. We elicited pointing at interesting events from thirty-two 12-month olds and thirty-two 18-month olds in tw ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · March 1, 2008
Although dogs, Canis familiaris, are skilful at responding to human social cues, the role of ontogeny in the development of these abilities has not been systematically examined. We studied the ability of very young dog puppies to follow human communicative ...
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Chapter · February 27, 2008
The universals and cultural variations of human development have been the focus of fruitful study by anthropologists for decades. In recent years psychologists also have directed their attention, long overdue, to understanding development in cultural conte ...
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Chapter · February 26, 2008
A central goal of cognitive science is to understand how human beings comprehend, produce, and acquire natural languages. Throughout the brief history of modern cognitive science, the linguistic theory that has been most prominent in this endeavor is gener ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of autism and developmental disorders · February 2008
Helping and cooperation are central to human social life. Here, we report two studies investigating these social behaviors in children with autism and children with developmental delay. In the first study, both groups of children helped the experimenter at ...
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Journal Article · January 1, 2008
To acquire competence with a natural language, young children must master the grammatical constructions of their language(s). In this article we outline the main theoretical issues in the field and trace the developmental path children follow from talking ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2008
Introduction Primates are highly social beings. They begin their lives clinging to their mother and nursing, and they spend their next few months, or even years, still in proximity to her. Adult primates live in close-knit social groups, for the most part, ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · January 1, 2008
English and German children aged 2 years 4 months and 4 years heard both novel and familiar verbs in sentences whose form was grammatical, but which mismatched the event they were watching (e.g., 'The frog is pushing the lion', when the lion was actually t ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal cognition · January 2008
We conducted three studies to examine whether the four great ape species (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans) are able to use behavioral experimenter-given cues in an object-choice task. In the subsequent experimental conditions subjects were p ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal cognition · January 2008
Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) know what others can and cannot see in a competitive situation. Does this reflect a general understanding the perceptions of others? In a study by Hare et al. (2000) pairs of chimpanzees competed over two pieces of food. Subor ...
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Journal ArticleInfancy · January 1, 2008
People often express excitement to each other when encountering an object that they have shared together previously in some special way. This study investigated whether 14-month-old infants know precisely what they have and have not shared in a special way ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of deaf studies and deaf education · January 2008
Early developmental psychologists viewed iconic representation as cognitively less complex than other forms of symbolic thought. It is therefore surprising that iconic signs are not acquired more easily than arbitrary signs by young language learners. One ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2008
There are, however, major debates as to what they bring to this language learning: do they come with innate, specifically syntactic skills or, rather, with more general cognitive and interactive skills? In this chapter, we will argue for the latter and sug ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2008
To acquire competence with a natural language, young children must master the grammatical constructions of their language(s). In this article we outline the main theoretical issues in the field and trace the developmental path children follow from talking ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · January 1, 2008
Reciprocal interactions observed in animals may persist because individuals keep careful account of services exchanged with each group member. To test whether chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, possess the cognitive skills required for this type of contingency- ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · November 2007
We investigated how 14-month-old infants know what others know. In two studies, an infant played with each of two objects in turn while an experimenter was present. Then the experimenter left the room, and the infant played with a third object with an assi ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · November 2007
This training study investigates how children learn to refer to things unambiguously. Two hundred twenty-four children aged 2.6, 3.6, and 4.6 years were pre- and posttested for their ability to request stickers from a dense array. Between test sessions, ch ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal cognition · October 2007
Chimpanzee's perspective-taking abilities are currently disputed. Here we show that in some food competition contexts, subordinate chimpanzees do take the visual perspective of dominant individuals, preferentially targeting a hidden piece of the food that ...
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Journal ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.) · October 2007
Traditional models of economic decision-making assume that people are self-interested rational maximizers. Empirical research has demonstrated, however, that people will take into account the interests of others and are sensitive to norms of cooperation an ...
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Journal ArticleLanguage and Cognitive Processes · September 1, 2007
We present the results from four studies, two corpora and two experimental, which suggest that English- and German-speaking children (3;1-4;9 years) use multiple constraints to process and produce object relative clauses. Our two corpora studies show that ...
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Journal ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.) · September 2007
Humans have many cognitive skills not possessed by their nearest primate relatives. The cultural intelligence hypothesis argues that this is mainly due to a species-specific set of social-cognitive skills, emerging early in ontogeny, for participating and ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of child language · August 2007
German children aged 2;1 heard a sentence containing a nonce noun and a nonce verb (Der Feks miekt). Either the noun or the verb was prosodically highlighted by increased pitch, duration and loudness. Independently, either the object or the action in the o ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · August 2007
People are willing to punish others at a personal cost, and this apparently antisocial tendency can stabilize cooperation. What motivates humans to punish noncooperators is likely a combination of aversion to both unfair outcomes and unfair intentions. Her ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · July 2007
Human infants imitate others' actions 'rationally': they copy a demonstrator's action when that action is freely chosen, but less when it is forced by some constraint (Gergely, Bekkering & Király, 2002). We investigated whether enculturated chimpanzees (Pa ...
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Journal ArticlePLoS biology · July 2007
People often act on behalf of others. They do so without immediate personal gain, at cost to themselves, and even toward unfamiliar individuals. Many researchers have claimed that such altruism emanates from a species-unique psychology not found in humans' ...
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Journal ArticlePsychological science · May 2007
Previous research has shown that many social animals follow the gaze of other individuals. However, knowledge about how this skill differs between species and whether it shows a relationship with genetic distance from humans is still fragmentary. In the pr ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of child language · May 2007
Using the weird word order methodology (Akhtar, 1999), we investigated children's understanding of SVO word order in French, a language with less consistent argument ordering patterns than English. One hundred and twelve French children (ages 2; 10 and 3; ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · May 2007
The current article proposes a new theory of infant pointing involving multiple layers of intentionality and shared intentionality. In the context of this theory, evidence is presented for a rich interpretation of prelinguistic communication, that is, one ...
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Journal ArticleMagyar Pszichologiai Szemle · April 1, 2007
We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared intentionality. Participation in such activities require ...
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ConferencePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · April 2007
Nicholas Humphrey's social intelligence hypothesis proposed that the major engine of primate cognitive evolution was social competition. Lev Vygotsky also emphasized the social dimension of intelligence, but he focused on human primates and cultural things ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · March 2007
There is currently controversy over the nature of 1-year-olds' social-cognitive understanding and motives. In this study we investigated whether 12-month-old infants point for others with an understanding of their knowledge states and with a prosocial moti ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · March 2007
Fourteen- and 18-month-old infants observed an adult experiencing each of 2 objects (experienced objects) and then leaving the room; the infant then played with a 3rd object while the adult was gone (unexperienced object). The adult interacted with the 2 e ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of human evolution · March 2007
As compared with other primates, humans have especially visible eyes (e.g., white sclera). One hypothesis is that this feature of human eyes evolved to make it easier for conspecifics to follow an individual's gaze direction in close-range joint attentiona ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of child language · February 2007
We investigated two main components of infant declarative pointing, reference and attitude, in two experiments with a total of 106 preverbal infants at 1;0. When an experimenter (E) responded to the declarative pointing of these infants by attending to an ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · January 1, 2007
In theory of mind research, there is a long standing dispute about whether children come to understand the subjectivity of both desires and beliefs at the same time (around age 4), or whether there is an asymmetry such that desires are understood earlier. ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · January 2007
We argue for the importance of processes of shared intentionality in children's early cognitive development. We look briefly at four important social-cognitive skills and how they are transformed by shared intentionality. In each case, we look first at a k ...
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Journal ArticleInfancy · January 1, 2007
Two experiments investigated the proclivity of 14-month-old infants (a) to altruistically help others toward individual goals, and (b) to cooperate toward a shared goal. The infants helped another person by handing over objects the other person was unsucce ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · December 2006
Brosnan et al. (Brosnan, S. F. Schiff, H. C. & de Waal, F. B. M. 2005 Tolerance for inequity may increase with social closeness in chimpanzees. Proc. R. Soc. B272, 253-258) found that chimpanzees showed increased levels of rejection for less-preferred food ...
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Journal ArticleInfancy · December 1, 2006
Gergely, Bekkering, and Király (2002) demonstrated that 14-month-old infants engage in "rational imitation." To investigate the development and flexibility of this skill, we tested 12-month-olds on a different but analogous task. Infants watched as an adul ...
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Journal ArticleEthology · December 1, 2006
All four species of great apes and young human children (12-24 mo of age) were administered an imitation task designed to distinguish between results learning (emulation) and action learning (imitation). Some subjects were exposed to a demonstrator either ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · November 2006
Twenty-two- and 27-month-old children were tested for their understanding of pretending as a specific intentional action form. Pairs of superficially similar behaviors - pretending to perform an action and trying to perform that action - were demonstrated ...
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Journal ArticleBehaviour · November 1, 2006
Many mammalian species are highly social, creating intra-group competition for such things as food and mates. Recent research with nonhuman primates indicates that in competitive situations individuals know what other individuals can and cannot see, and th ...
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Journal ArticleLinguistic Review · October 1, 2006
The early phases of syntactic acquisition are characterized by many input frequency and item effects, which argue against theories assuming innate access to classical syntactic categories. In formulating an alternative view, we consider both prototype and ...
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Journal ArticleCognition · October 2006
There is little experimental evidence that any non-human species is capable of purposefully attempting to manipulate the psychological states of others deceptively (e.g., manipulating what another sees). We show here that chimpanzees, one of humans' two cl ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Cognition and Development · September 15, 2006
In the studies presented here, infants' understanding of others' attention was assessed when gaze direction cues were not diagnostic. Fourteen-, 18- and 24-month-olds witnessed an adult look to the side of an object and express excitement. In 1 experimenta ...
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Journal ArticleBritish Journal of Developmental Psychology · September 11, 2006
The current study sought to determine the age at which children first engage in Level I visual perspective-taking, in which they understand that the content of what another person sees in a situation may sometimes differ from what they see. An adult entere ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · September 2006
Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) (Study 1) and 18- and 24-month-old human children (Study 2) participated in a novel communicative task. A human experimenter (E) hid food or a toy in one of two opaque containers before gesturing tow ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of child language · August 2006
This study investigated different accounts of children's acquisition of non-subject wh-questions. Questions using each of 4 wh-words (what, who, how and why), and 3 auxiliaries (BE, DO and CAN) in 3sg and 3pl form were elicited from 28 children aged 3;6-4; ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · August 1, 2006
The cooperative abilities of captive chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, in experiments do not match the sophistication that might be predicted based on their naturally occurring cooperative behaviours. This discrepancy might partly be because in previous experi ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Cognition and Development · July 25, 2006
Classically, infants are thought to point for 2 main reasons: (a) They point imperatively when they want an adult to do something for them (e.g., give them something; "Juice!"), and (b) they point declaratively when they want an adult to share attention wi ...
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Journal ArticleBritish Journal of Developmental Psychology · June 15, 2006
The present work investigated the development of an explicit understanding of pretend play actions. Study I revealed a long décalage between earlier implicit understanding of pretence as an intentional activity and a later more explicit understanding. Stud ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983) · May 2006
Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) competed with a human for food. The human sat inside a booth, with 1 piece of food to her left and 1 to her right, which she could retract from her chimpanzee competitor's reach as needed. In Experiment 1, chimpanzees could ap ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · May 2006
Human children 18-24 months of age and 3 young chimpanzees interacted in 4 cooperative activities with a human adult partner. The human children successfully participated in cooperative problem-solving activities and social games, whereas the chimpanzees w ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal cognition · April 2006
In previous studies great apes have shown little ability to locate hidden food using a physical marker placed by a human directly on the target location. In this study, we hypothesized that the perceptual similarity between an iconic cue and the hidden rew ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · April 1, 2006
In many cognitive domains, learning is more effective when exemplars are distributed over a number of sessions than when they are all presented within one session. The present study investigated this distributed learning effect with respect to English-spea ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · April 1, 2006
We present empirical data showing that the relative frequency with which a verb normally appears in a syntactic construction predicts young children's ability to remember and repeat sentences instantiating that construction. Children aged 2;10-5;8 years we ...
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Journal ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences · April 2006
Sensitivity to fairness may influence whether individuals choose to engage in acts that are mutually beneficial, selfish, altruistic, or spiteful. In a series of three experiments, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) could pull a rope to access out-of-reach food ...
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Journal ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.) · March 2006
Human beings routinely help others to achieve their goals, even when the helper receives no immediate benefit and the person helped is a stranger. Such altruistic behaviors (toward non-kin) are extremely rare evolutionarily, with some theorists even propos ...
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Journal ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.) · March 2006
Humans collaborate with non-kin in special ways, but the evolutionary foundations of these collaborative skills remain unclear. We presented chimpanzees with collaboration problems in which they had to decide when to recruit a partner and which potential p ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983) · February 2006
Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) and great apes from the genus Pan were tested on a series of object choice tasks. In each task, the location of hidden food was indicated for subjects by some kind of communicative, behavioral, or physical cue. On the basis ...
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Journal ArticleApplied Psycholinguistics · January 1, 2006
Choosing appropriate referring expressions requires assessing whether a referent is "available" to the addressee either perceptually or through discourse. In Study 1, we found that 3- and 4-year-olds, but not 2-year-olds, chose different referring expressi ...
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Journal ArticleGesture · January 1, 2006
This study represents a systematic investigation of the communicative repertoire of Sumatran orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus abelii), with a focus on intentional signals in two groups of captive orangutans. The goal was to analyze the signal repertoire with res ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal cognition · January 2006
Dogs can use the placement of an arbitrary marker to locate hidden food in an object-choice situation. We tested domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) in three studies aimed at pinning down the relative contributions of the human's hand and the marker itself. W ...
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Journal ArticleLinguistic Review · December 12, 2005
Generative grammar retained from American structural linguistics the 'formal' approach, which basically effaces the semantic and pragmatic dimensions of grammar. This creates serious problems for an account of language acquisition, most especially the prob ...
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Journal ArticleFirst Language · December 1, 2005
It has been proposed that children acquiring case-marking languages might be quicker to acquire certain constructions than children acquiring word order languages, because the cues involved in grammatical morphology are more 'local', whereas word order is ...
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Journal ArticleLanguage · December 1, 2005
This study reconsiders the acquisition of relative clauses based on data from two sentence-repetition tasks. Using materials modeled on the relative constructions of spontaneous child speech, we asked four-year-old English- and German-speaking children to ...
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Journal ArticleInfancy · December 1, 2005
Three types of role reversal imitation were investigated in typically developing 12-and 18-month-old infants and in children with autism and other developmental delays. Many typically developing infants at both ages engaged in each of the 2 types of dyadic ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · December 2005
PurposeThis study explored the effect of frequency (number of presentations), and spacing (period between presentations) on verb learning in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Children learn words more efficiently when presentations ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · November 2005
This study explored infants' ability to infer communicative intent as expressed in non-linguistic gestures. Sixty children aged 14, 18 and 24 months participated. In the context of a hiding game, an adult indicated for the child the location of a hidden to ...
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Journal ArticleApplied Psycholinguistics · October 1, 2005
Speakers use different types of referring expressions depending on what the listener knows or is attending to; for example, they use pronouns for objects that are already present in the immediate discourse or perceptual context. In a first study we found t ...
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Journal ArticleThe Behavioral and brain sciences · October 2005
We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared intentionality. Participation in such activities require ...
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Journal ArticleBehavioral and Brain Sciences · October 1, 2005
As Bruner so eloquently points out, and Gauvain echoes, human beings are unique in their "locality." Individual groups of humans develop their own unique ways of symbolizing and doing things - and these can be very different from the ways of other groups, ...
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Journal ArticleTrends in cognitive sciences · September 2005
Domestic dogs are unusually skilled at reading human social and communicative behavior--even more so than our nearest primate relatives. For example, they use human social and communicative behavior (e.g. a pointing gesture) to find hidden food, and they k ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal cognition · July 2005
There is currently much debate about the nature of social learning in chimpanzees. The main question is whether they can copy others' actions, as opposed to reproducing the environmental effects of these actions using their own preexisting behavioral strat ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · June 2005
Children's understanding of the grammatical categories of "determiner" and "adjective" was examined using 2 different methodologies. In Experiment 1, children heard novel nouns combined with either a or the. Few 2-year-olds, but nearly all 3- and 4-year-ol ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983) · May 2005
Following the gaze direction of conspecifics is an adaptive skill that enables individuals to obtain useful information about the location of food, predators, and group mates. In the current study, the authors compared the gaze-following skills of all 4 gr ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · March 2005
Infants experienced a female adult handling them toys. Sometimes, however, the transaction failed, either because the adult was in various ways unwilling to give the toy (e.g., she teased the child with it or played with it herself) or else because she was ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · January 1, 2005
Gaze following is a basic social cognitive skill with many potential benefits for animals that live in social groups. At least five primate species are known to follow the gaze of conspecifics, but there have been no studies on gaze following in other mamm ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · January 1, 2005
Akhtar [Akhtar, N. (1999). Acquiring basic word order: Evidence for data-driven learning of syntactic structure. Journal of Child Language, 26, 339-356] taught children novel verbs in ungrammatical word orders. Her results suggested that the acquisition of ...
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Journal ArticleMonographs of the Society for Research in Child Development · January 2005
We report a series of 10 studies on the social-cognitive abilities of three young chimpanzees. The studies were all ones previously conducted with human infants. The chimpanzees were 1-5 years of age, had been raised mostly by humans, and were tested mostl ...
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Journal ArticleGesture · January 1, 2005
Gestural communication of nonhuman primates may allow insight into the evolutionary scenario of human communication given the flexible use and learning of gestures as opposed to vocalizations. This paper provides an overview of the work on the gestural com ...
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Journal ArticleCorpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory · January 1, 2005
Recent studies of the English verb particle construction have shown that particle placement varies with a variety of linguistic features, which seem to influence the speaker's choice of a particular position. The current study investigates whether children ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · January 2005
In the context of an imitation game, 12- and 18-month-old infants saw an adult do such things as make a toy mouse hop across a mat (with sound effects). In one condition (House), the adult ended by placing the mouse in a toy house, whereas in another condi ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · January 2005
The focus of the present study was the role of cultural learning in infants' acquisition of pretense actions with objects. In three studies, 18- and 24-month-olds (n = 64) were presented with novel objects, and either pretense or instrumental actions were ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican journal of primatology · January 2005
This article aims to provide an inventory of the communicative gestures used by bonobos (Pan paniscus), based on observations of subadult bonobos and descriptions of gestural signals and similar behaviors in wild and captive bonobo groups. In addition, we ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Cognition and Development · December 1, 2004
This article reports 2 experiments examining the changing role of iconicity in symbol learning and its implications regarding the mechanisms supporting symbol-to-referent mapping. Experiment 1 compared 18- and 26-month-olds' mapping of iconic gestures (e.g ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican journal of primatology · December 2004
Gestural communication in a group of 19 captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) was observed, with particular attention paid to gesture sequences (combinations). A complete inventory of gesture sequences is reported. The majority of these sequences were repe ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · December 2004
In the "blocking-and-retrieval-failure" account of overregularization (OR; G. F. Marcus, 1995; G. F. Marcus et al., 1992), the claim that a symbolic rule generates regular inflection is founded on pervasively low past tense OR rates and the lack of a subst ...
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Journal ArticleApplied Animal Behaviour Science · October 1, 2004
Previous studies have shown that dogs have developed a special sensitivity to the communicative signals and attentional states of humans. The aim of the current study was to further investigate what dogs know about the visual perception of humans and thems ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal cognition · October 2004
A number of animal species have evolved the cognitive ability to detect when they are being watched by other individuals. Precisely what kind of information they use to make this determination is unknown. There is particular controversy in the case of the ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · September 2004
Understanding the intentional actions of others is a fundamental part of human social cognition and behavior. An important question is therefore whether other animal species, especially our nearest relatives the chimpanzees, also understand the intentional ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · September 1, 2004
In a series of four experiments, chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, were given two cognitive tasks, an object choice task and a discrimination task (based on location), each in the context of either cooperation or competition. In both tasks chimpanzees performe ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · June 2004
Infants point for various motives. Classically, one such motive is declarative, to share attention and interest with adults to events. Recently, some researchers have questioned whether infants have this motivation. In the current study, an adult reacted t ...
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Journal ArticlePsychologie Francaise · June 1, 2004
Pragmatics is about how individuals use their inventory of semiotic devices, the strategic choices they make, in particular acts of communication. An interesting question is the degree to which other animal species, especially our nearest primate relatives ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · May 2004
In 3 studies, young children were tested for their understanding of pretend actions. In Studies 1 and 2, pairs of superficially similar behaviors were presented to 26- and 36-month-old children in an imitation game. In one case the behavior was marked as t ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · February 2004
Childers and Tomasello (2001) found that training 2 1/2-year-olds on the English transitive construction greatly improves their performance on a post-test in which they must use novel verbs in that construction. In the current study, we replicated Childers ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental science · February 2004
Infants follow the gaze direction of others from the middle of the first year of life. In attempting to determine how infants understand the looking behavior of adults, a number of recent studies have blocked the adult's line of sight in some way (e.g. wit ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Child Language · January 1, 2004
There has been relatively little discussion in the field of child language acquisition about how best to sample from children's spontaneous speech, particularly with regard to quantitative issues. Here we provide quantitative information designed to help r ...
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Journal ArticleInteraction Studies · January 1, 2004
A previous observational study suggested that when faced with a partner with its back turned, chimpanzees tend to move around to the front of a non-attending partner and then gesture-rather than gesturing once to attract attention and then again to convey ...
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Journal ArticlePrimates; journal of primatology · January 2004
The current study represents the first systematic investigation of the social communication of captive siamangs (Symphalangus syndactylus). The focus was on intentional signals, including tactile and visual gestures, as well as facial expressions and actio ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental Science · November 1, 2003
The current studies used a priming methodology to assess the abstractness of children's early syntactic constructions. In the main study, 3-, 4- and 6-year-old children were asked to describe a prime picture by repeating either an active or a passive sente ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · September 2003
Infants at 12 and 18 months of age played with 2 adults and 2 new toys. For a 3rd toy, however, 1 of the adults left the room while the child and the other adult played with it. This adult then returned, looked at all 3 toys aligned on a tray, showed great ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983) · September 2003
Twelve domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) were given a series of trials in which they were forbidden to take a piece of visible food. In some trials, the human continued to look at the dog throughout the trial (control condition), whereas in others, the huma ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · August 2003
During the early stages of language acquisition, children pass through a stage of development when they produce both finite and nonfinite verb forms in finite contexts (e.g., "it go there," "it goes there"). Theorists who assume that children operate with ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · July 2003
The current study used a training methodology to determine whether different kinds of linguistic interaction play a causal role in children's development of false belief understanding. After 3 training sessions, 3-year-old children improved their false bel ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican journal of primatology · July 2003
In the present study we investigated the gestural communication of gorillas (Gorilla gorilla). The subjects were 13 gorillas (1-6 years old) living in two different groups in captivity. Our goal was to compile the gestural repertoire of subadult gorillas, ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of child language · May 2003
The aim of the current study was to determine the degree to which a sample of one child's creative utterances related to utterances that the child previously produced. The utterances to be accounted for were all of the intelligible, multi-word utterances p ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental Science · April 1, 2003
Markson and Bloom (1997) found that some learning processes involved in children's acquisition of a new word are also involved in their acquisition of a new fact. They argued that these findings provided evidence against a domain-specific system for word l ...
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Journal ArticleTrends in Cognitive Sciences · April 1, 2003
New data suggest that relatively drastic revisions are needed in our theoretical accounts of what other animal species understand about the psychological states of others. Specifically, chimpanzees seem to understand some things about what others do and do ...
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Journal ArticleMind and Language · January 1, 2003
It is widely believed that what distinguishes the social cognition of humans from that of other animals is the belief-desire psychology of four-year-old children and adults (so-called theory of mind). We argue here that this is actually the second ontogene ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Science · January 1, 2003
The child directed speech of twelve English-speaking mothers was analyzed in terms of utterance-level constructions. First, the mothers' utterances were categorized in terms of general constructional categories such as Wh-questions, copulas and transitives ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · January 1, 2003
Capuchin monkeys were tested in five experiments in which two individuals competed over food. When given a choice between retrieving a piece of food that was visible or hidden from the dominant, subordinate animals preferred to retrieve hidden food. This p ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Cognition and Development · December 1, 2002
This article attempts to summarize Katherine Nelson's theoretical and empirical contributions to the ontogenetic study of language and cognition. Nelson's approach has consistently emphasized the function of language and linguistic concepts in children's l ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · November 2002
Two-year-old children were taught either 6 novel nouns, 6 novel verbs, or 6 novel actions over 1 month. In each condition, children were exposed to some items in massed presentations (on a single day) and some in distributed presentations (over the 2 weeks ...
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Journal ArticleScience (New York, N.Y.) · November 2002
Dogs are more skillful than great apes at a number of tasks in which they must read human communicative signals indicating the location of hidden food. In this study, we found that wolves who were raised by humans do not show these same skills, whereas dom ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · September 2002
This study investigated children's understanding of others' intentions in a social learning context. Specifically, it investigated whether knowing an adult's prior intention before the adult gives a demonstration influences what children learn from the dem ...
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Journal ArticleBritish Journal of Developmental Psychology · September 1, 2002
We report two studies that suggest that some 36-month-old (and younger) children understand others' false beliefs. In the false belief conditions, children and two adults (E1 and E2) watched as an object was put into a container. E1 left the room, and E2 s ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of child language · August 2002
Two nonce-word studies examined German-speaking children's productivity with the Perfekt (present perfect) from 2;6 to 3;6. The German Perfekt consists of the past participle of the main verb and an inflected form of an auxiliary (either haben 'have' or se ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · November 2001
Two studies investigating the linguistic representations underlying English-speaking 2 1/2-year-olds' production of transitive utterances are reported. The first study was a training study in which half the children heard utterances with full nouns as agen ...
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Journal ArticleApplied Psycholinguistics · June 1, 2001
We analyzed the three main types of English dative constructions - the double-object dative, the to dative, and the for dative - in the spontaneous speech of seven children from the age of 1;6 to 5;0. The main findings were as follows. First, the double-ob ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Linguistics · January 1, 2001
This study examines the development of relative clauses in the speech of four English-speaking children between 1;9 and 5;2 years of age. It is shown that the earliest relative clauses occur in presentational constructions that express a single proposition ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Linguistics · January 1, 2001
Usage-based models of language focus on the specific communicative events in which people learn and use language. In these models, the psycholinguistic units with which individuals operate are determined not by theoretical fiat but by observation of actual ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Cross-Cultural Psychology · January 1, 2001
Human beings are biologically adapted for culture in ways that other primates are not, as evidenced most clearly by the fact that only human cultural traditions accumulate modifications over historical time (the ratchet effect). The key adaptation is one t ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Linguistics · January 1, 2001
This article examines the development of finite complement clauses in the speech of seven English-speaking children aged 1;2 to 5;2.It shows that in most of children's complex utterances that seem to include a finite complement clause, the main clause does ...
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Journal ArticlePrimates · January 1, 2001
Observation of a novel food processing technique is reported for captive zoo gorillas (Gorilla g. gorilla). It is similar in function to that of Japanese macaques' wheat placer mining behaviour and consists of puffing/blowing air with the mouth onto a mixt ...
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Journal ArticleBehavioral and Brain Sciences · January 1, 2001
Although Bloom gives more credit to social cognition (mind reading) than do most other theorists of word learning, he does not go far enough. He still relies fundamentally on a learning process of association (or mapping), neglecting the joint attentional ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · January 1, 2001
Akhtar [J. Child Lang. 26 (1999) 339.] found that when 4-year-old English-speaking children hear novel verbs in transitive utterances with ungrammatical word orders (e.g., Elmo the tree meeked), they correct them to canonical SVO order almost all of the ti ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental Science · January 1, 2001
In this study we sought to determine the degree to which 2-to 3-year-old children use objects symbolically in the relative absence of adult symbolic actions or linguistic descriptions, and how the nature of objects influences symbolic play. Results reveale ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · January 1, 2001
We conducted three experiments on social problem solving by chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes. In each experiment a subordinate and a dominant individual competed for food, which was placed in various ways on the subordinate's side of two opaque barriers. In so ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · January 1, 2001
Primates follow the gaze direction of conspecifics to outside objects. We followed the ontogeny of this social-cognitive skill for two species: rhesus macaques and chimpanzees, in the first two experiments, using both a cross-sectional and a longitudinal d ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Cognition · December 1, 2000
The results of three experiments are reported. In the main study, a human experimenter presented domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) with a variety of social cues intended to indicate the location of hidden food. The novel findings of this study were: (1) dog ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Cognition · December 1, 2000
Chimpanzees follow conspecific and human gaze direction reliably in some situations, but very few chimpanzees reliably use gaze direction or other communicative signals to locate hidden food in the object-choice task. Three studies aimed at exploring facto ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · December 2000
Most studies of children's use of pronouns have focused either on the morphology of personal pronouns or on the anaphoric use of pronouns by older children. The current two studies investigated factors affecting children's choice of pronouns as referring e ...
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Journal ArticleTrends in Cognitive Sciences · April 1, 2000
Recent research using both naturalistic and experimental methods has found that the vast majority of young children's early language is organized around concrete, item-based linguistic schemas. From this beginning, children then construct more abstract and ...
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Journal ArticleCognition · March 2000
Many developmental psycholinguists assume that young children have adult syntactic competence, this assumption being operationalized in the use of adult-like grammars to describe young children's language. This "continuity assumption" has never had strong ...
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Journal ArticleCurrent Directions in Psychological Science · January 1, 2000
Human beings are biologically adapted for culture in ways that other primates are not. The difference can be clearly seen when the social learning skills of humans and their nearest primate relatives are systematically compared. The human adaptation for cu ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Science · January 1, 2000
I introduce the special issue by: (1) outlining something of the relationship between mainstream cognitive science and the study of nonhuman primate cognition; (2) providing a brief overview of the scientific study of primate cognition and how the papers o ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · January 1, 2000
We report a series of experiments on social problem solving in chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes. In each experiment a subordinate and a dominant individual were put into competition over two pieces of food. In all experiments dominants obtained virtually all o ...
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Journal ArticleInfant Behavior and Development · December 1, 1999
The current study was a replication and extension of a study of infant imitative learning by Meltzoff (1995). Unlike the 18-month-old infants in that study (and other 18-month-olds in the current study), the 12-month-olds in this study did not frequently i ...
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Journal ArticleBehavioral and Brain Sciences · December 1, 1999
We discuss other recent studies on the acquisition of the German plural that do not support the dual-mechanism model. The attested overgeneralizations are not by default only, nor completely random, but predictable from subregularities based on the grammat ...
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Journal ArticleBritish Journal of Developmental Psychology · November 1, 1999
Much of young children's symbolic play is heavily scaffolded by adult symbolic action models, which children may imitate, and by adult verbal scripts. The current studies attempted to evaluate 18-35-month-old children's symbolic skills in the absence of su ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · November 1999
The present study examined English-speaking children's tendency to make argument structure overgeneralization errors (e.g., I disappeared it). Children were exposed to several English verbs of fixed transitivity (exclusively intransitive or exclusively tra ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · March 1999
A nonverbal task of false belief understanding was given to 4- and 5-year-old children (N = 28) and to two species of great ape: chimpanzees and orangutans (N = 7). The task was embedded in a series of finding games in which an adult (the hider) hid a rewa ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · January 1999
Younger and older children (mean ages = 2 years 11 months and 3 years 5 months) learned 2 nonce verbs in a full passive or active transitive construction. When asked patient-focused questions encouraging passive-voice replies (e.g., "What happened to the b ...
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Journal ArticleLanguage · January 1, 1999
We tested two hypotheses about how English-speaking children learn to avoid making argument structure errors such as Don't giggle me. The first is that children base their usage of verbs on membership in narrow-range semantic classes (Pinker 1989). The sec ...
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Journal ArticleAnnual Review of Anthropology · January 1, 1999
Human beings are biologically adapted for culture in ways that other primates are not, as evidenced most clearly by the fact that only human cultural traditions accumulate modifications over historical time (the ratchet effect). The key adaptation is one t ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · January 1, 1999
Two experiments on chimpanzee gaze following are reported. In the first, chimpanzee subjects watched as a human experimenter looked around various types of barriers. The subjects looked around each of the barriers more when the human had done so than in a ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental Science · January 1, 1999
Two studies are reported in which chimpanzees attempted to use social cues to locate hidden food in one of two possible hiding places. In the first study four chimpanzees were exposed to a local enhancement cue (the informant approached and looked to the l ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Comparative Psychology · January 1, 1999
Ten domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) of different breeds and ages were exposed to 2 different social cues indicating the location of hidden food, each provided by both a human informant and a conspecific informant (for a total of 4 different social cues). ...
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Journal ArticleFirst Language · December 1, 1998
Two studies of English-speaking children's acquisition of the passive construction are reported. In the first study children at 3.0 and 3.5 years of age were taught to produce full passive utterances with a nonce verb through rich discourse interaction. Al ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of child language · October 1998
Twenty-four children between 2;5 and 3;1 were taught two nonce verbs. Each verb was used multiple times by an adult experimenter to refer to a highly transitive action involving a mostly animate agent (including the child herself) and a patient of varying ...
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Journal ArticleThe Behavioral and brain sciences · October 1998
To explain social learning without invoking the cognitively complex concept of imitation, many learning mechanisms have been proposed. Borrowing an idea used routinely in cognitive psychology, we argue that most of these alternatives can be subsumed under ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983) · June 1998
This study investigates the understanding of others' intentions in 2- and 3-year-old children, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), and orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus). During training, subjects learned to use a discriminative cue to select a baited box. During test ...
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Journal ArticleBehavioural Processes · February 1, 1998
Evidence for primates' understanding of causality is presented and discussed. Understanding causality requires the organism to understand not just that two events are associated with one another in space and time, but also that there is some 'mediating for ...
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Journal ArticlePragmatics and Cognition · January 1, 1998
My approach to reference focuses on naturally occuring processes of communication, and in particular on children’s earliest referential activities. I begin by describing three different kinds of child gesture – ritualizations, deictics, and symbolic gestur ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Linguistics · January 1, 1998
Much of children's early syntactic development can be seen as the acquisition of sentence-level constructions that correspond to relatively complex events and states of affairs. The ctirrent study was an attempt to determine the relative concreteness (verb ...
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Journal ArticleMonographs of the Society for Research in Child Development · January 1998
At around 1 year of age, human infants display a number of new behaviors that seem to indicate a newly emerging understanding of other persons as intentional beings whose attention to outside objects may be shared, followed into, and directed in various wa ...
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Journal ArticleSocial Development · January 1, 1998
The current study investigated the ontogenetic origins of children's skills of cooperative problem-solving in a task involving two complementary roles. Participants were peer dyads of 24, 30, 36, and 42 months of age. Primary dyads were initially presented ...
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Journal ArticleInfant Behavior and Development · January 1, 1998
This study explored infants' ability to discriminate between, and their tendency to reproduce, the accidental and intentional actions of others. Twenty 14- through 18-month-olds watched an adult perform a series of two-step actions on objects that made int ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental Science · January 1, 1998
Two hypotheses about primate cognition are proposed. First, it is proposed that primates, but not other mammals, understand categories of relations among external entities. In the physical domain primates have special skills in tasks such as oddity, transi ...
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Journal ArticleCurrent Anthropology · January 1, 1998
Culture has traditionally been attributed only to human beings. Despite growing evidence of behavioral diversity in wild chimpanzee populations, most anthropologists and psychologists still deny culture to this animal species. We argue here that culture is ...
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Journal ArticleAnimal Behaviour · January 1, 1998
Individuals from five primate species were tested experimentally for their ability to follow the visual gaze of conspecifics to an outside object. Subjects were from captive social groups of chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, sooty mangabeys, Cercocebus atys to ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · December 1997
Forty-eight young children (2.5 and 3.0 years old) and 9 great apes (6 chimpanzees and 3 orangutans) participated in a hiding-finding game. An adult human experimenter (the Hider) hid a reward in 1 of 3 opaque containers aligned on a wooden plank. Another ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental psychology · November 1997
Four studies examined English-speaking children's productivity with word order and verb morphology. Two- and 3-year-olds were taught novel transitive verbs with experimentally controlled argument structures. The younger children neither used nor comprehend ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of child language · June 1997
A fundamental question of child language acquisition is children's productivity with newly learned forms. The current study addressed this question experimentally with children just beginning to combine words. Ten children between 1;6 and 1;11 were taught ...
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Journal ArticleHuman Development · January 1, 1997
The naturally occurring gestures of chimpanzees and prelinguistic human infants are compared. Considered as special cases are apes raised by humans as they gesture to humans, and children with autism. Overall, the most important differences between the ges ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of child language · February 1996
Previous studies have demonstrated that children aged 2;0 can learn new words in a variety of non-ostensive contexts. The current two studies were aimed at seeing if this was also true of children just beginning to learn words at 1;6. In the first study an ...
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Journal ArticleBritish Journal of Developmental Psychology · January 1, 1996
Two studies of word learning in 24-month-old children are reported, one involving an object word (Study 1) and one involving an action word (Study 2). In both studies, non-verbal scripts of playing with novel objects/actions in particular ways were establi ...
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Journal ArticleChild Development · January 1, 1996
2 studies of word learning are reported. In Study 1, 24-month-old children and 2 adults played with 3 nameless objects. These objects were placed in a clear box along with a novel nameless object. The adults then displayed excitement about the contents of ...
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Journal ArticleCulture and Psychology · January 1, 1996
Toomela (1996) has emphasized the psychological dimensions of the process by which human children become participants in cultures. I support his arguments with observations of chimpanzees, which are similar to humans in some ways but still do not live cult ...
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Journal ArticleHuman Development · January 1, 1996
Both Piaget and Vygotsky were centrally concerned with the ontogenetic relationships between language, cognition, and social life. Recently, researchers have drawn on their observations and hypotheses to establish much closer links between these phenomena ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983) · September 1995
Fourteen juvenile and adult orangutans and 24 3- and 4-year-old children participated in 4 studies on imitative learning in a problem-solving situation. In all studies a simple to operate apparatus was used, but its internal mechanism was hidden from subje ...
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Journal ArticleSocial Development · January 1, 1995
In this study we compared the nature of the joint attentional interactions that occurred as chimpanzees and human children engaged with a human experimenter (E). Subjects were three chimpanzees raised mostly with conspecifics (mother‐reared), three chimpan ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · January 1, 1995
Previous studies have found that children can use social-pragmatic cues to determine "which one" of several objects or "which one' of several actions an adult intends to indicate with a novel word. The current studies attempted to determine whether childre ...
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Chapter · January 1, 1995
This chapter discusses the early development of the understanding of self as social agent in the human species, and briefly discusses its ontogenetic and phylogenetic origins. The chapter outlines the canonical developmental sequence, focusing especially o ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983) · December 1994
We report 3 studies of the referential pointing of 2 orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus). Chantek was raised in an enculturated environment; Puti, raised in a nursery, had a more typical captive life. In Experiment 1, flexibility of pointing behavior was investiga ...
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Journal ArticleHuman Evolution · October 1, 1994
Very little is known about the social learning of orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus), especially in the context of problem-solving situations such as tool use. Sixteen orangutans were presented with a rake-like tool and desirable but out-of-reach food. Eight subj ...
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Journal ArticlePrimates · January 1, 1994
Observations of chimpanzee gestural communication are reported. The observations represent the third longitudinal time point of an ongoing study of the Yerkes Primate Center Field Station chimpanzee group. In contrast to observations at the first two time ...
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Journal ArticleAmerican Journal of Physical Anthropology · January 1, 1994
This paper reviews what is known about the social cognition of monkeys and great apes. The literature reviewed is divided into three main content areas: (1) social interaction, including knowledge of individuals, knowledge of social relationships, alliance ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental Psychology · January 1, 1994
Four word learning studies with 24-month-old children are reported. In Studies 1 and 2, an adult used a novel word to announce her intention to perform an action or to find an object. It was found that a knowledge of what action or object was impending-est ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · December 1993
In this study we compared the abilities of chimpanzees and human children to imitatively learn novel actions on objects. Of particular interest were possible differences between chimpanzees raised mostly with conspecifics (mother-reared) and chimpanzees ra ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983) · June 1993
Common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and 2-year-old human children (Homo sapiens) were presented with a rakelike tool and a desirable but out-of-reach object. One group of subjects observed a human demonstrator use the tool in one way, and another group ob ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · January 1, 1993
This study investigated experimentally the nature and development of children's early productivity with nouns, both in verb-argument structure and with plural morphology. Eight 20- to 26-month-old boys and girls were, in the context of playing a game over ...
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Journal ArticleCognitive Development · January 1, 1993
This study investigated experimentally the nature and development of children's early productivity with verb-argument structure and verb morphology. Twenty-two to 25-month-old boys and girls were, in the context of playing a game over a several week period ...
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Journal ArticleBehavioral and Brain Sciences · January 1, 1993
This target article presents a theory of human cultural learning. Cultural learning is identified with those instances of social learning in which intersubjectivity or perspective-taking plays a vital role, both in the original learning process and in the ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of child language · June 1992
Two studies of verb learning are reported. The focus of both studies was on children in their second year of life learning verbs in various pragmatic contexts. Of particular interest was the comparison of ostensive contexts--in which word and referent were ...
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Journal ArticleSocial Development · January 1, 1992
A language is composed of conventional symbols shaped by their social‐communicative functions. Children acquire these symbols, both lexical and syntactic, in the context of culturally constituted event structures that make salient these functions. In the a ...
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Journal ArticleFirst Language · January 1, 1992
The pragmatics of sibling-infant and mother-infant conversations were compared. Sixteen children, 22 to 26 months of age, were videotaped for 15 minutes in dyadic interaction with their mothers and for 15 minutes in dyadic interaction with their preschool- ...
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Journal ArticleChild Development · January 1, 1991
The current study investigated the general nature of joint attentional and conversational interaction in mother‐infant‐sibling triads. 9 19‐month‐old infants and 9 24‐month‐old infants were videotaped during 20 min of free play with their mothers and presc ...
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Journal ArticleStudies in Second Language Acquisition · January 1, 1991
Beck and Eubank (1991) criticize our recent SSLA article (Tomasello & Herron, 1989) on both theoretical and methodological grounds. While we appreciate their attempt to discuss and clarify important issues—and while they do make several sound and very inte ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of child language · February 1990
In this study we compared the conversations of mothers and fathers with their children at 1; 3 and 1; 9, with special attention to breakdown-repair sequences. We found that, overall, children and secondary caregiver fathers experienced more communicative b ...
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Journal ArticleFolia primatologica; international journal of primatology · January 1990
The peer interactions of 6 infant chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) ranging in age from 18 to 50 months were observed in a seminatural context. The infants and their mothers lived as members of a captive social group at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Cen ...
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Journal ArticleStudies in Second Language Acquisition · January 1, 1989
In this study we compared two methods for correcting language transfer errors in the foreign language classroom. Thirty-two English-speaking college students enrolled in two sections of an introductory French course served as subjects. Eight commonly encou ...
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Journal ArticlePrimates · January 1, 1989
A longitudinal study of chimpanzee gestural communication is reported. Subjects were seven 5- to 8-year-old members of a semi-natural group at the Yerkes Field Station. These were the same individuals observed by Tomasello et al. (1985) four years previous ...
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Journal ArticleApplied Psycholinguistics · January 1, 1988
In this study we compared two methods for teaching grammatical exceptions in the foreign language classroom. Thirty-nine students in two sections of an introductory college French course served as subjects. Eight target structures, exemplifying –exceptions ...
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Journal ArticleLanguage Sciences · January 1, 1988
In this paper I examine the role of joint attentional processes in the child's early lexical acquisition and conversational interaction. In both cases I conclude that relatively extended periods of adult-child joint attentional focus on nonlinguistic entit ...
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Journal ArticleHuman Evolution · April 1, 1987
In the current study two groups of young chimpanzees (4-6 and 8-9 years old) were given a T-bar and a food item that could only be reached by using the T-bar. Experimental subjects were given the opportunity to observe an adult using the stick as a tool to ...
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Journal ArticleChild development · December 1986
This paper reports 2 studies that explore the role of joint attentional processes in the child's acquisition of language. In the first study, 24 children were videotaped at 15 and 21 months of age in naturalistic interaction with their mothers. Episodes of ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental Psychology · September 1, 1986
Piaget hypothesized that peer and adult-child discussions of moral dilemmas are qualitatively different. He asserted that children are more likely to use reasoning when interacting with peers. To test this hypothesis, the present study compared the interac ...
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Journal ArticleDevelopmental Psychology · March 1, 1986
The current study investigated differences in the language learning environments of singletons and twins, with special reference to pragmatic factors that might be expected to differ in dyadic and triadic interactive situations. Six twin pairs and 12 singl ...
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Journal ArticleFolia primatologica; international journal of primatology · January 1986
A captive chimpanzee group was observed in order to determine the extent to which the social interactions of the infants and juveniles (18-50 months) were affected by their mothers' relationships with other adult group members. It was found that the young ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of Human Evolution · January 1, 1985
Plooij (Action, Gesture and Symbol, Academic Press 1978; Before Speech, C.U.P. 1979) described some intentionally-produced communicatory gestures used by one-year-old chimpanzees on the Gombe Stream Reserve. The current study investigated the use of this t ...
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Journal ArticleJournal of speech and hearing research · September 1984
Initial characterizations of the communicative abilities of preschoolers stressed their egocentric nature. Recently, however, even 2-year-olds have been observed to adjust their speech appropriately in situations in which the listener provides feedback by ...
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Journal ArticleFirst Language · January 1, 1984
The current study investigated the relationship between young children's linguistic and nonlinguistic communicative strategies. Twenty-three children, 20-44 months of age, served as subjects. In a naturalistic setting, an adult gave signs of noncomprehensi ...
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Journal ArticleFirst Language · January 1, 1984
The effect of sentence length on children's attention and com prehension was studied. Twenty-five two- to five-year-olds were placed into three groups, High, Middle, and Low, based on their mean length of utterance (MLU). Subsequently, each child watched t ...
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Journal ArticleFirst Language · January 1, 1983
Recent research has documented systematic individual differences in early lexical development. The current study investigated the relation ship of these differences to differences in the way mothers and children regulate each other's attentional states. Mo ...
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