Children this age are beginning to form complex categories of objects. For example, they may have learned that apples and oranges are types of fruit. One way that children learn about categories is by comparing different instances of a category with one another and discovering what is common among them, such as that apples and oranges are both round, edible, and grow on trees. This helps children identify additional, less familiar category members such as mangoes. We are currently studying the circumstances under which comparison is most beneficial to children when they are learning about categories.

To do this we play a game with four year olds using picture cards. Children are shown two pictures from a single category (e.g., apple and orange) under a variety of conditions and are asked to find another member of the category from a choice of three other pictures.

By five years of age children have become pretty sophisticated word learners and might be able to use something as subtle as tone of voice to figure out a word’s meaning. For example, if we want to teach children the meaning of the word "enormous", we might deepen our voices and elongate our vowels, to make the word seem bigger and thereby resemble its meaning. Some of our research examines whether children can use these cues to help them decipher meaning.

In this study the researcher uses a puppet (Francine the Frog) to ask the child to pick out a picture. Children choose from two pictures that illustrate different meanings on a dimension such as big and little. For example, they might be shown picture of a big flower and a picture of a little flower. Francine uses made up names to ask for a particular picture (“Can you get the blicket one?”) but with a tone of voice that may cue the child to pick one or the other picture.