Browsing by Author "Diesendruck, Gil"

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    Children's use of syntactic and pragmatic knowledge in the interpretation of novel adjectives
    (Wiley : Society for Research In Child Development, 2006-01) Diesendruck, Gil; Hall, D. Geoffrey; Graham, Susan
    In Study 1, English-speaking 3- and 4-year-olds heard a novel adjective used to label one of two objects and were asked for the referent of a different novel adjective. Children were more likely to select the unlabelled object if the two adjectives appeared prenominally (e.g., "a very DAXY dog") than as predicates (e.g., "a dog that is very DAXY"). Study 2 revealed that this response occurred only when both adjectives were prenominal. Study 3 replicated Study 1 with Hebrew-speaking 3- and 4-year-olds, even though in Hebrew both types of adjectives appear postnominally. Preschoolers understand that prenominal adjectives imply a restriction of the reference of nouns, and this knowledge motivates a contrastive pragmatic inference regarding the referents of different prenominal adjectives.
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    Fifteen-month-old infants attend to shape over other perceptual properties in an induction task
    (Elsevier : Cognitive Development, 2010-01) Graham, Susan; Diesendruck, Gil
    This study examined whether infants privilege shape over other perceptual properties when making inferences about the shared properties of novel objects. Forty-six 15-month-olds were presented with novel target objects that possessed a non-obvious property, followed by test objects that varied in shape, color, or texture relative to the target. Infants generalized the non-obvious property to test objects that were highly similar in shape, but not to objects that shared the same color or texture. These results demonstrate that infants’ attention to shape is not specific to lexical contexts and is present at the early stages of productive language development. The implications of these findings for debates about children’s shape bias, in particular, and the nature of infants’ categories more generally, are discussed.
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    Kind matters: A reply to Samuelson and Perone
    (Elsevier : Cognitive Development, 2010-01) Diesendruck, Gil; Graham, Susan
    in the article that is a subject of Samuelson and Perone’s commentary, we reported the results of a study in which 15-month-olds were presented with novel target objects that possessed a non-obvious property—a novel sound. We found that infants attempted to elicit the novel sound on test objects that matched the target object in shape, more so than on test objects that matched the target in color or texture. Critically, this pattern of behavior emerged only in a condition in which none of the test objects could actually produce a sound. We concluded that this selective generalization to shape-matched objects reflects infants’ expectation that objects similar in shape share non-obvious properties. In their commentary, Samuelson and Perone (S&P) challenged our interpretation on both empirical and theoretical grounds. In what follows, we respond to these challenges by first addressing incorrect representations of our findings and then discussing the theoretical challenges presented in their commentary.