In experiments 1 and 2, infants spontaneously and selectively informed Raf inhibitor the adult about the aversive material in the location the adult falsely believed to hold her toy. In contrast, in experiment 3, infants informed the ignorant adult about both locations equally. Results reveal that infants expected the adult to commit a specific action mistake when she held a false belief, but
not when she was ignorant. Further, infants were motivated to intervene proactively. Findings reveal a predictive action-based usage of “theory-of-mind” skills at 18 months of age. “
“This study investigates infants’ discrimination abilities for familiar and unfamiliar regional English accents. Using a variation of the head-turn preference procedure, 5-month-old infants demonstrated that they were
able to distinguish between their own South-West English accent and an unfamiliar Welsh English accent. However, this distinction was not seen when two unfamiliar accents (Welsh English and Scottish English) were presented to the infants, indicating they had not acquired the general ability to distinguish between regional HM781-36B manufacturer varieties, but only the distinction between their home accent and unfamiliar regional variations. This ability was also confirmed with 7-month-olds, challenging recent claims that infants lose their sensitivity to dialects at around that age. Taken together, our results argue in favor of an early sensitivity to the intonation system of languages, and to the early learning of accent-specific intonation and potentially segmental patterns. Implications for the development of accent normalization abilities are discussed. “
“Behne, Carpenter, Call, and Tomasello
(2005) showed that 9- to 18-month-olds, but not 6-month-olds, Non-specific serine/threonine protein kinase differentiated between people who were unwilling and unable to share toys. As the outcome of the two tasks is the same (i.e., the toy is not shared), the infants must respond to the different goals of the actor. However, visual habituation paradigms have shown an earlier onset of goal awareness. The present study reconciles this disparity by replicating the findings of Behne et al. with both 6- and 9-month-olds, using similar tasks and additional response measures. “
“Infant phonetic perception reorganizes in accordance with the native language by 10 months of age. One mechanism that may underlie this perceptual change is distributional learning, a statistical analysis of the distributional frequency of speech sounds. Previous distributional learning studies have tested infants of 6–8 months, an age at which native phonetic categories have not yet developed. Here, three experiments test infants of 10 months to help illuminate perceptual ability following perceptual reorganization.