Outputs (18)

Registered Report Stage 2. How Well Do Children Remember Fast-Mapped Words? A Pre-Registered Meta-Analysis of Retention Following the Mutual Exclusivity Response (2025)
Journal Article
Mather, E., & Lindsay, S. (2025). Registered Report Stage 2. How Well Do Children Remember Fast-Mapped Words? A Pre-Registered Meta-Analysis of Retention Following the Mutual Exclusivity Response. Infant and Child Development, 34(3), Article e70019. https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.70019

There is widespread evidence that children display a mutual exclusivity response upon encountering new words. Children displaying this behaviour will select a novel, name-unknown object in response to a novel label, rather than a familiar, name-known... Read More about Registered Report Stage 2. How Well Do Children Remember Fast-Mapped Words? A Pre-Registered Meta-Analysis of Retention Following the Mutual Exclusivity Response.

Developmental psychologists should care about measurement precision (2022)
Journal Article
Lindsay, S., & Mather, E. (in press). Developmental psychologists should care about measurement precision. Infant and Child Development, Article e2321. https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.2321

In a wide ranging article in this journal, Byers-Heinlein et al. (2022) make a persuasive case for paying close attention to reliability in developmental research. They focus on measurement reliability, which indexes how well individuals can be ranke... Read More about Developmental psychologists should care about measurement precision.

Why would a special FM process exist in adults, when it does not appear to exist in children? (2019)
Journal Article
O’Connor, R. J., Lindsay, S., Mather, E., & Riggs, K. J. (2019). Why would a special FM process exist in adults, when it does not appear to exist in children?. Cognitive neuroscience, 10(4), 221-222. https://doi.org/10.1080/17588928.2019.1574260

Cooper Greve, and Henson (this issue)  caution restraint before accepting that a fast mapping (FM) process exists in adults. We welcome this, but would also add that the original rationale for studying FM in adults is not currently supported by devel... Read More about Why would a special FM process exist in adults, when it does not appear to exist in children?.

Reprint of “Young children's referent selection is guided by novelty for both words and actions” (2016)
Journal Article
Dysart, E. L., Mather, E., & Riggs, K. J. (2016). Reprint of “Young children's referent selection is guided by novelty for both words and actions”. Journal of experimental child psychology, 151, 33-39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2016.08.003

This article is a reprint of a previously published article. For citation purposes, please use the original publication details; Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Volume 146, June 2016, Pages 231–237.

Get your facts right : preschoolers systematically extend both object names and category-relevant facts (2016)
Journal Article
Holland, A. K., Mather, E., Simpson, A., & Riggs, K. J. (2016). Get your facts right : preschoolers systematically extend both object names and category-relevant facts. Frontiers in Psychology, 7(JUL), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01064

There is an ongoing debate over the extent to which language development shares common processing mechanisms with other domains of learning. It is well-established that toddlers will systematically extend object labels to similarly-shaped category ex... Read More about Get your facts right : preschoolers systematically extend both object names and category-relevant facts.

Young children's referent selection is guided by novelty for both words and actions (2016)
Journal Article
Dysart, E. L., Mather, E., & Riggs, K. J. (2016). Young children's referent selection is guided by novelty for both words and actions. Journal of experimental child psychology, 146, 231-237. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2016.01.003

Young children are biased to select novel, name-unknown objects as referents of novel labels (e.g., Markman, 1990) and similarly favour novel, action-unknown objects as referents of novel actions (Riggs, Mather, Hyde & Simpson, 2015). What process un... Read More about Young children's referent selection is guided by novelty for both words and actions.

Parallels between action-object mapping and word-object mapping in young children (2015)
Journal Article
Riggs, K. J., Mather, E., Hyde, G., & Simpson, A. (2016). Parallels between action-object mapping and word-object mapping in young children. Cognitive science, 40(4), 992-1006. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12262

© 2016 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. Across a series of four experiments with 3- to 4-year-olds we demonstrate how cognitive mechanisms supporting noun learning extend to the mapping of actions to objects. In Experiment 1 (n = 61) the demonstration... Read More about Parallels between action-object mapping and word-object mapping in young children.

Priming by relational integration in perceptual identification and Stroop colour naming (2013)
Journal Article
Mather, E., Estes, Z., & Jones, L. L. (2014). Priming by relational integration in perceptual identification and Stroop colour naming. Journal of Memory and Language, 71(1), 57-70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2013.10.004

Integrative priming is the facilitated recognition of a target word following a prime word with which it can be combined to produce a sub-type of the target (e.g., a lake bird is a type of bird). Such priming occurs even in the absence of lexical ass... Read More about Priming by relational integration in perceptual identification and Stroop colour naming.

Novelty, attention, and challenges for developmental psychology (2013)
Journal Article
Mather, E. (2013). Novelty, attention, and challenges for developmental psychology. Frontiers in Psychology, 4(AUG), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00491

In this brief essay, I seek to demonstrate the significance of exploratory behavior for understanding cognitive development. Historically, organisms were thought to act solely in the service of achieving biologically significant goals, such as satisf... Read More about Novelty, attention, and challenges for developmental psychology.

Bootstrapping the early lexicon: how do children use old knowledge to create new meanings? (2013)
Journal Article
Mather, E. (2013). Bootstrapping the early lexicon: how do children use old knowledge to create new meanings?. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, Article 96. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00096

Compared to other aspects of language development, such as acquiring grammar, we perhaps take for granted the complexity of building a lexicon. More than 50 years ago the philosopher W.V.O. Quine provided a now famous example of what makes word learn... Read More about Bootstrapping the early lexicon: how do children use old knowledge to create new meanings?.