Linguistic, concept and symbolic composition in adults with minimal receptive vocabulary

In this paper, we examine some basic linguistic abilities in a small sample of adults with minimal receptive vocabulary, whose receptive mental verbal age ranges from 1;2 to 3;10. In particular, we examine whether the participants in our study understand noun phrases consisting of a noun modified by an adjective. We use stimuli that they can recognise by name. Except for one participant, we find that, while all of them understand the noun and adjective in isolation, none seems to understand these noun phrases, which means that they seem to not do linguistic composition. In order to test whether the difficulty is linguistic or conceptual, we ran two other studies, one on concept composition, and the other on iconic symbolic composition (composition of pictograms). Results suggest that linguistic composition is particularly difficult in this population, and that vocabulary breadth may not predict compositional abilities

Imitation fidelity increases with age in boys, but not in girls: An intriguing finding in a cohort of children aged 3 to 6 years

Imitation that entails faithful reproduction of demonstrated behavior by reenacting a sequence of actions accurately is a fast and efficient way to acquire new skills as well as to conform to social norms. Previous studies reported that both culture and gender might impinge on young children’s fidelity of imitation. We analyzed the imitative behavior of 87 children whose ages ranged from 3 to 6 years. An instrumental task was administered that offered partial (opaque apparatus) or total (transparent apparatus) information about causal connection between the demonstrated actions and their effect in achieving a desired reward. Imitative fidelity (imitating the actions that were demonstrated by an adult model yet were unnecessary for achieving the instrumental goal) increased as a function of age in boys, whereas no differences were found in girls. This lack of increase in girls can be ascribed to their displaying higher degrees of imitation fidelity at an earlier age

ESM - Details on stimuli and results from Are monkeys intuitive Aristotelians? Associations between target size and vertical target position in long-tailed macaques

This document provides supplementary information about the presented stimuli, about result patterns of both experimental groups in the horizontal training stages of the main study, and more detailed information of methods and results of Study 2

ESM - Data from Are monkeys intuitive Aristotelians? Associations between target size and vertical target position in long-tailed macaques

This file contains the datasets of both studie