Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) were collected from
669 British children aged between 1;0 and 2;1. Comprehension and
production scores in each age group are calculated. This provides
norming data for the British infant population. The influence of socio-economic group on vocabulary scores is considered and shown not to
have a significant effect. The data from British infants is compared to
data from American infants (Fenson, Dale, Reznick, Bates, Thal &
Pethick, 1994). It is found that British infants have lower scores on both
comprehension and production than American infants of the same age.
Infants (12 to 17 months) were taught 2 novel words for 2 images of novel objects, by pairing isolated auditory labels with to‐be‐associated images. Comprehension was tested using a preferential looking task in which the infant was presented with both images together with an isolated auditory label. The auditory label usually, but not always, matched one of the images. Infants looked preferentially at images that matched the auditory stimulus. The experiment controlled within‐subjects for both side bias and preference for previously named items. Infants showed learning after 12 presentations of the new words. Evidence is presented that, in certain circumstances, the duration of longest look at a target may be a more robust measure of target preference than overall looking time. The experiment provides support for previous demonstrations of rapid word learning by pre‐vocabulary spurt children, and offers some methodological improvements to the preferential looking task.
Findings demonstrate WBB-related cognitive improvements in 7- to 10-year-old children. These effects would seem to be particularly sensitive to the cognitive demand of task.
Previous investigations comparing auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) to words whose meanings infants did or did not comprehend, found bilateral differences in brain activity to known versus unknown words in 13-month-old infants, in contrast with unilateral, left hemisphere, differences in activity in 20-month-old infants. We explore two alternative explanations for these findings. Changes in hemispheric specialization may result from a qualitative shift in the way infants process known words between 13 and 20 months. Alternatively, hemispheric specialization may arise from increased familiarity with the individual words tested. We contrasted these two explanations by measuring ERPs from 20-month-old infants with high and low production scores, for novel words they had just learned. A bilateral distribution of ERP differences was observed in both groups of infants, though the difference was larger in the left hemisphere for the high producers. These findings suggest that word familiarity is an important factor in determining the distribution of brain regions involved in word learning. An emerging left hemispheric specialization may reflect increased efficiency in the manner in which infants process familiar and novel words.
The cognitive benefits of acute flavonoid interventions have been well documented, however, research to date has found that, depending on developmental stage, these benefits manifest themselves in different cognitive domains. It is argued that the lack of global cognitive effects following flavonoid intervention may be a result of insufficient task sensitivity for those domains where no benefits are found. In children, executive function is a cognitive domain which has shown little apparent benefit following flavonoid intervention. Here, we describe a Modified Attention Network Task (MANT) designed to vary levels of cognitive demand across trials in order to investigate whether flavonoid related benefits can be shown for executive function when task sensitivity is carefully manipulated. Twenty-one children were recruited to a double blind cross-over study consuming 30 g freeze dried blueberry powder (WBB) or placebo before being tested at 3 hours. Performance in the WBB condition was found to be significantly faster in comparison to placebo particularly on more cognitively demanding incongruent and high load trials. Trials in which a visual cue alerted participants to the imminent appearance of the target also showed better performance following WBB administration. We conclude that WBB administration can enhance executive function during demanding elements of a task, but that the complexity and demand of the task as a whole may be equally important to performance.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.