Derek E. Montgomery

Mental Verbs and Semantic Development

This theoretical essay examines how mental verbs acquire meaning as they emerge in childrens lexicon. The article begins by describing the ostension paradigm, which presumes that meaning derives from the relation between a mental verb and a corresponding referent. This paradigm is then critiqued by drawing on Wittgensteins private language argument. The private language argument contends that meaning is tied to how a person uses a word in everyday discourse as opposed to whether one has correctly mapped a label and referent. Drawing from this argument, the semantic development of mental verbs is considered within the framework of contemporary theories emphasizing semantic development as a process of learning how, when, and for what purpose words are used. The implications of this view for theory of mind development are discussed.

The Effect of Delayed Responding on Stroop-Like Task Performance among Preschoolers.

ABSTRACT Forty-four preschoolers completed 2 conditions of a Stroop-like procedure (e.g., saying “boat” for car and “car” for boat) that differed in whether a 3-s delay was imposed before responding. The test card was visible during the delay period for half of the children and occluded for the other children. Preschoolers’ interference control was significantly improved in the delay condition. There was no difference between the two delay variants (test card visible or occluded). Children were more prone to interference as testing progressed regardless of whether the delay was present. These results suggest that delays effectively reduce interference by reducing the potency of the competing response during test trials, although memory demands may moderate the effectiveness of delays.

The influence of nonverbal cues associated with looking behavior on young children's mentalistic attributions

The ability of children to use looking behavior as a cue to guide their mentalistic attributions was assessed. In Experiment 1 video displays were presented in which a protagonist faced one of two potential goals, half of the time standing equidistant from both targets and in the remaining trials standing closer to the target not being faced. Preschoolers consistently based their inferences of anothers attention and goal on the direction in which the protagonist was facing. However, in Experiments 2 and 3 preschoolers experienced difficulty in correctly inferring an actors desired goal when the protagonists body was oriented in a direction opposite of where she was looking. Under these conditions, only young elementary school children consistently inferred that the protagonists goal was the target being looked at (Experiment 2). The results from these three studies suggest that an important development occurring in childhood is the ability to consistently distinguish gaze from body orientation when inferring the goals of another. The implications of this development for childrens understanding of the mind are discussed.

The Influence of Stimulus Discriminability on Young Children's Interference Control in the Stroop-Like Happy–Sad Task

The day–night paradigm, where children respond to a pair of pictures with opposite labels for a series of trials, is a widely used measure of interference control. Recent research has shown that a happy–sad variant of the day–night task was significantly more difficult than the standard day–night task. The present research examined whether the perceptual discriminability of the happy–sad task pictures impacts young childrens interference control. When test card pairs were equally distinct between conditions, children performed similarly regardless of whether the happy–sad or day–night response terms were employed (Experiment 1). Two versions of the happy–sad task were administered in Experiment 2, and children experienced significantly more interference when the stimuli were perceptually similar than when they were distinct. Theoretical implications for the role attentional demands play in interference control in Stroop-like tasks for pre-readers are discussed.

Situational features influencing young children's mentalistic explanations of action☆

This research assessed whether variable self-initiated movement and perceptual access to goals influence children to regard an action as mentalistically caused. In Study 1, preschoolers, first graders, and adults chose whether the actions of artifacts, insects, mammals, or humans were caused by mental or physical states. At all ages mental explanations were generally preferred in the presence (but not the absence) of the three situational cues (ps < .001). Also, the proportion of mental explanations by adults, and to a lesser extent by first graders, significantly increased depending upon the biological sophistication of the actor. In Study 2, preschoolers and first graders witnessed scenarios in which the presence of perceptual access or variable self-initiated movement was varied. Spontaneous mentalistic explanations of action were more common in both age groups when the feature of interest was present than when it was absent, ps < .001. Taken together, these studies suggest that children abstract specific features of action when construing its cause across disparate situations and actors and that doing so plays a vital role in learning when to generalize mentalistic explanations to new situations.

Body Posture and Religious Attitudes

One hundred and twenty-seven college students were recruited for an experimental investigation of the effect of body posture on religious attitudes. Roughly half of the participants were placed in lower, contractive body postures while the other half were placed in higher, expansive body postures. After five minutes in these postures, all were asked to fill out a measure of religious attitudes. As expected, participants in the lower, contractive positions expressed more agreement with conventional religious beliefs than those in the higher, expansive positions.