Recent publications
These are just a few recent publications from the lab. For a complete listing of past and forthcoming publications, take a look at Dr. Sabbagh’s CV, here.
Semantic Word Learning
Young children learn word-referent links in cross-situational learning paradigms despite uncertainty as to what a given word refers to in individual exposures. However, it is unknown if children develop semantic representations of these word-referent links. Using a novel event-related potential testing approach, we found evidence that semantic encoding can occur during cross-situational learning, but that pre-training on the paradigm may be critical for semantic word learning.
Mangardich & Sabbagh (2022). Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
Promoting Executive Functioning
A child’s ability to flexibly shift from using one rule to another is part of their “Executive Functioning”, which is a suite of skills that are important for learning. In this paper, we showed that one thing that can make preschool children more flexible thinkers is playing games designed to help them create better representations of the rules themselves.
Bardikoff & Sabbagh (2021). Child Development
Learning Irregular Past-Tense Verbs
For most verbs, we make the past tense of them by adding “-ed” as in learn-learned. But then others are “irregular” and we make the past tense a different way, as in catch-caught. In this paper we found evidence that preschoolers’ flexible thinking skills play an important role in their growing ability to correctly use these challenging irregular past-tense verbs.
Yuile & Sabbagh (2020). Journal of Child Language
The Developing Social Brain
Our ability to make sophisticated judgments about other people’s intentions, beliefs, and desires, develops quickly during the preschool years. In this paper, we found evidence that preschoolers’ development in a specific area of the brain — the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex — is important for how both how good they perform on social reasoning tasks when they are preschoolers, and how their brains respond to social reasoning tasks 3 years later when they’re about 7 years old.
Bowman et al. (2019). Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience