Do preschoolers think adults know more about everything than children? Or do they recognize that there are some things that children might know more about than adults? Three-, four-, and fiveyear-olds (N = 65) were asked to decide whether an adult or child informant would better be able to answer a variety of questions about the nutritional value of foods and about toys. Children at all ages chose to direct the food questions to the adult and the toy questions to the child. Thus, there are some kinds of information for which preschoolers expect that a child would be a better informant than an adult.Much of our knowledge is based on information that other people have provided to us rather than on first-hand, direct experience. For example, if I wanted to know the benefits of eating foods rich in antioxidants, I would consult a doctor rather than conducting my own experiments. If I wanted to know the special code to use to give myself extra powers in a videogame, I would consult a gamer rather than trying to figure it out myself. As adults, in addition to recognizing the limitations of our own expertise, we recognize that other people are similarly limited. As a result, we selectively seek out particular people depending on the type of information we are looking for: A doctor is probably a better source of information about antioxidants than a gamer, and a gamer is probably a better source of information about videogames than a doctor.

In recent years, parents in the United States and worldwide have purchased enormous numbers of videos and DVDs designed and marketed for infants, many assuming that their children would benefit from watching them. We examined how many new words 12- to 18-month-old children learned from viewing a popular DVD several times a week for 4 weeks at home. The most important result was that children who viewed the DVD did not learn any more words from their monthlong exposure to it than did a control group. The highest level of learning occurred in a no-video condition in which parents tried to teach their children the same target words during everyday activities. Another important result was that parents who liked the DVD tended to overestimate how much their children had learned from it. We conclude that infants learn relatively little from infant media and that their parents sometimes overestimate what they do learn.

Two studies investigated 3-to 5-year-olds' trust in a reliable informant when judging novel labels and novel plural and past tense forms. In Study 1, children (N=24) endorsed the names of new objects given by an informant who had earlier labeled familiar objects correctly over the names given by an informant who had labeled the same objects incorrectly. In Study 2, children (N = 24) endorsed novel names given by an informant who had earlier expressed the plural of familiar nouns correctly over one who had expressed the plural incorrectly. But children overwhelmingly endorsed the regular plural and past tense forms of new words provided by the formerly unreliable labeler (Study 1) or morphologist (Study 2) rather than irregular forms of those words provided by the formerly reliable informant.From a very early age, English-speaking children can easily generate the regular plural and past tense forms of novel nouns and verbs. For example, in a classic study, Berko (1958) showed 4-to 7-year-olds, a picture of a novel creature and referred to it as a wug. They were then shown two of the same kind of creature and were prompted to provide the plural: "Now there are two -." Most children responded by saying wugs. When they were shown a picture of a novel action called ricking (e.g., a man swinging a spiky ball around) and prompted to provide the past tense, most children responded by saying ricked. Although some words are easier for children to regularize than others (e.g., wugs is easier than nizzes, ricked is easier than motted), the basic phenomenon is quite robust: Children can create the regular plural or past tense forms of words they have never heard before.The vast majority of English nouns and verbs fit this regular paradigm (i.e., add -s for plural, add -ed for past tense). But 2% of noun plural types and 14% of the 1,000 most common verb past tense types are actually irregular (Marcus, 1996). For example, the plural of mouse is mice, not mouses; the past tense of go is went, not goed; and so on. This raises an important question: Given children's robust expectations about regularity, how do they deal with input that suggests that a particular word takes an irregular form?On the one hand, we know that they do not automatically dismiss this input because of course, they do learn that some words are irregular. On the other hand, we also know that they do not automatically accept any input that conflicts with their expectations. For Naigles, Gleitman, and Gleitman (1993) found that 3-and 4-year-olds who heard a familiar intransitive verb used transitively (e.g., "The lion comes the giraffe") tended to treat that unexpected usage as if it were an error (e.g., as if the speaker meant to say "The lion comes to the giraffe" or even "The lion combs the giraffe"). The issue of how children reconcile input about irregular nouns and verbs with their expectations about regularity is complicated further by the fact that they sometimes hear overregularized tokens. Their peers, for example, sometimes say breaked i...

No abstract

No abstract