Combining forces for causal reasoning: Children's predictions about physical interactions.

Reasoning about causal relations is essential for children's early cognitive development. The current study investigated 4-year-olds' (N = 58) reasoning about complex causal physical interactions in terms of predicting the endpoint of motion. In an online task, children were presented with four configurations that involved different interactions of forces and consequently different patterns of motion. These were Cause (one force moving an object), Enable (a secondary force promoting the motion), Prevent-180° (an opposing force hindering the motion), and Prevent-90° (two-dimensional; a perpendicular force altering the motion). Each prediction was made in terms of either the Distance or Direction of the motion, which was novel in this task compared with previous assessments. Results revealed differences between the configurations, with Cause being the easiest and Prevent-90° being the most difficult to predict. Furthermore, predictions were more accurate when options were about the motion's Direction, whereas Distance options may have aggravated reasoning. The current study extends previous findings on children's intuitive physics and causal cognition by showing that accuracy in reasoning not only is dependent on the number of forces and dimensions at work but also interacts with estimating the motion's Distance and Direction.

Stacking the evidence: Parents' use of acoustic packaging with preschoolers.

Segmenting continuous events into discrete actions is critical for understanding the world. As infants may lack top-down knowledge of event structure, caregivers provide audiovisual cues to guide the process, aligning action descriptions with event boundaries to increase their salience. This acoustic packaging may be specific to infant-directed speech, but little is known about when and why the use of this cue wanes. We explore whether acoustic packaging persists in parents' teaching of 2.5-5.5-year-old children about various toys. Parents produced a smaller percentage of action speech relative to studies with infants. However, action speech largely remained more aligned to action boundaries relative to non-action speech. Further, for the more challenging novel toys, parents modulated their use of acoustic packaging, providing it more for those children with lower vocabularies. Our findings suggest that acoustic packaging persists beyond interactions with infants, underscoring the utility of multimodal cues for learning, particularly for less knowledgeable learners in challenging learning environments.

Any way the wind blows: Children's inferences about force and motion events.

Göksun, George, Hirsh-Pasek, and Golinkoff (2013) used force dynamics, or the semantic categories defined by spatial arrays of forces, to study the development of preschoolers' predictions about the outcomes of forces working in concert. The current study extends this approach to problems requiring inferences about causal factors. In total, 30 5- and 6-year-old children were asked to identify and coordinate forces to achieve a result. Problems varied in the number and orientation of forces, mirroring spatial arrays characteristic of categories like prevent (i.e., opposing forces). Children successfully inferred causes of single- and dual-force events, performing best when problems reflected the spatial arrays of forces described in language. Results support force dynamics as a valuable framework for the development of force and motion representations.

Carving the world for language: how neuroscientific research can enrich the study of first and second language learning.

Linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience all have rich histories in language research. Crosstalk among these disciplines, as realized in studies of phonology, is pivotal for understanding a fundamental challenge for first and second language learners (SLLs): learning verbs. Linguistic and behavioral research with monolinguals suggests that infants attend to foundational event components (e.g., path, manner). Language then heightens or dampens attention to these components as children map word to world in language-specific ways. Cross-linguistic differences in semantic organization also reveal sources of struggles for SLLs. We discuss how better integrating neuroscience into this literature can unlock additional mysteries of verb learning.

Forces and motion: how young children understand causal events.

How do children evaluate complex causal events? This study investigates preschoolers' representation of force dynamics in causal scenes, asking whether (a) children understand how single and dual forces impact an object's movement and (b) this understanding varies across cause types (Cause, Enable, Prevent). Three-and-a half- to 5.5-year-olds (n = 60) played a board game in which they were asked to predict the endpoint of a ball being acted upon by one or two forces. Children mostly understood the interactions of forces underlying each type of cause; only 5.5-year-olds could integrate two contradictory forces. Children perceive force interactions underlying causal events, but some concepts might not be fully understood until later in childhood. This study provides a new way of thinking about causal relations.