Diane Poulin-Dubois

Gender stereotyping in infancy: Visual preferences for and knowledge of gender-stereotyped toys in the second year

Infants’ visual preferences for gender-stereotyped toys and their knowledge of stereotyped toys were examined in two experiments using an adaptation of the preferential looking paradigm. Girls and boys aged 12, 18, and 24 months were tested for their preference for photos of vehicles or dolls, and for whether they associated (“matched”) these two stereotyped sets of toys with the faces and voices of male and female children. Results of Experiment 1 (N = 77) demonstrated significant preferences for gender stereotyped toys appearing by 18 months of age. In Experiment 2 (N = 58), girls were able to associate the gender-stereotyped toys with girls’ and boys’ faces by 18 months of age, but boys were not. Implications for theories of early gender development are discussed.

Word Mapping and Executive Functioning in Young Monolingual and Bilingual Children

The effect of bilingualism on the cognitive skills of young children was investigated by comparing performance of 162 children who belonged to one of two age groups (approximately 3- and 4.5-year-olds) and one of three language groups on a series of tasks examining executive control and word mapping. The children were monolingual English speakers, monolingual French speakers, or bilinguals who spoke English and one of a large number of other languages. Monolinguals obtained higher scores than bilinguals on a receptive vocabulary test and were more likely to demonstrate the mutual exclusivity constraint, especially at the younger ages. However, bilinguals obtained higher scores than both groups of monolinguals on three tests of executive functioning: Lurias tapping task measuring response inhibition, the opposite worlds task requiring children to assign incongruent labels to a sequence of animal pictures, and reverse categorization in which children needed to reclassify a set of objects into incongruent categories after an initial classification. There were no differences between the groups in the attentional networks flanker task requiring executive control to ignore a misleading cue. This evidence for a bilingual advantage in aspects of executive functioning at an earlier age than previously reported is discussed in terms of the possibility that bilingual language production may not be the only source of these developmental effects.

Infants' intermodal knowledge about gender

The aim of this study was to seek evidence of intermodal knowledge about gender in young infants that would provide direct evidence of the existence of gender categories during the 1st year. In Experiment 1, 9- and 12-month-olds were presented with pairs of male and female pictures with a female or male voice presented simultaneously. The infants spent significantly more time looking at the pictures matching the voices than at the same pictures paired with mismatching voices, but only in the case of female stimuli. Comparison to chance level performance suggested that the matching effect was more consistent in older subjects. In Experiment 2, a 2nd group of 9-month-olds was tested with a set of highly stereotypical faces and distinctive male and female voices. Infants showed a preference for the faces matching the voices, but this effect was again restricted to female stimuli

Men Don't Put on Make-up: Toddlers' Knowledge of the Gender Stereotyping of Household Activities.

Toddlers’knowledge of the stereotyping of traditionally feminine and masculine household activities was examined in two experiments. The experiments used a generalized imitation paradigm which required toddlers (total N = 63) to select a male or female doll to imitate nine masculine, feminine and neutral activities (e.g., shaving, vacuuming, sleeping). In the first experiment, 24-month-old girls, but not boys, demonstrated knowledge of both feminine and masculine activities. Results from study 2 indicated that boys possess some knowledge of these stereotyped activities by the age of 31 months. The results of the two experiments suggested that knowledge about the gender stereotyping of familiar activities can be demonstrated in children as young as 24 months.

Lexical access and vocabulary development in very young bilinguals.

This study compares lexical access and expressive and receptive vocabulary development in monolingual and bilingual toddlers. More specifically, the link between vocabulary size, production of translation equivalents, and lexical access in bilingual infants was examined as well as the relationship between the Communicative Development Inventories and the Computerized Comprehension Task. Twenty-five bilingual and 18 monolingual infants aged 24 months participated in this study. The results revealed significant differences between monolingual and bilinguals’ expressive vocabulary size in L1 but similar total vocabularies. Performance on the Computerized Comprehension Task revealed no differences between the two groups on measures of both reaction time and accuracy, and a strong convergent validity of the Computerized Comprehension Task with the Communicative Development Inventories was observed for both groups. Bilinguals with a higher proportion of translation equivalents in their expressive vocabulary showed faster access to words in the Computerized Comprehension Task.

Representational change in young children's understanding of familiar verb meaning

The ability to generalize verbs to new examples of previously labelled events demonstrates an implicit understanding that verbs are representative symbols of categories of events. The present study examined when and how very young children generalize familiar verbs to novel events by using the preferential looking paradigm. Overall, 24 children aged 1;8 and 25 children aged 2;2 demonstrated their understanding of the verbs kick and pick-up by looking significantly longer at the target events on control trials. Additionally, children aged 1;8 with the largest expressive vocabulary generalized the same verbs to actions with different agents, but not to actions differing in outcome or manner of action. In contrast, children aged 2;2 consistently extended familiar action verbs to other actions differing in agent or manner, regardless of the size of their expressive vocabulary. These findings were not due to the saliency of any of the actions used and are interpreted in terms of representational change consistent with the acquisition of lexical learning principles.

Infants' disambiguation of novel object words

When preschool-aged children are presented with two objects, one familiar and one unfamiliar, and asked for the referent of a novel word, they will consistently map the novel word to the novel object, a tendency called the disambiguation effect. In this study, we examined the relation between vocabulary size and the disambiguation response tendency during late infancy. Sixteen- to 22-month-old infants were presented with a novel object along with two familiar objects and asked to choose the referents of familiar and novel words. The infants who consistently chose the novel object in the presence of a novel word had significantly higher productive vocabularies than those who did not. These two groups, however, did not differ in age or on familiar word trials. These results suggest that emergence of the disambiguation effect in late infancy is related to productive vocabulary size rather than age.

Of bears and men: Infants’ knowledge of conventional and metaphorical gender stereotypes

Abstract Infants’ knowledge of conventional and metaphorical gender stereotypes was examined using a “violation of expectancy” task. Eighteen- and twenty-four-month-old infants were shown identical pictures of masculine or feminine items (e.g., hammer, bear; dress, cat) on two computer screens, with an accompanying gender-neutral prompt saying, “This is the one I like. Can you look at me?” Immediately following the pictures, two adult faces, one male and one female, appeared. Half of the items were conventionally associated with each gender, the other half were metaphorically related to each gender. Results indicated that masculine conventional and metaphorical gender knowledge have been acquired by the middle of the second year, with infants relating such items as fire hats, hammers, fir trees, and bears with males. It is suggested that metaphorical gender stereotypes may play a significant role in the rapid expansion of children’s gender schemas which follows the toddler period.

Salient object parts and infants' acquisition of novel object words

In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that the early acquisition of object labels is facilitated by the presence of perceptually salient object parts. Twenty-two infants (mean age = 1;8.21 years) participated in four lexical training sessions during which they were introduced to two types of object words: words whose referents possessed one salient part (e.g., peacock) and words whose referents had no salient parts (e.g., pigeon) as rated by adult judges. Multiple-choice comprehension tests were administered at the end of each session to assess word learning. A generaliz ation task was also administered to examine the status of object parts in determining word extension. The results indicated that the words whose referents possessed a salient part were learned more easily than those whose referents did not possess a salient part. The magnitude of this effect was related to the size of childrens vocabularies, but not to the age of the children. These findings support the hypothesis that salient object parts contribute to the acquisition of object labels in the early stages of lexical development.

The effects of bilingual growth on toddlers’ executive function

The mastery of two languages provides bilingual speakers with cognitive benefits over monolinguals, particularly on cognitive flexibility and selective attention. However, extant research is limited to comparisons between monolinguals and bilinguals at a single point in time. This study investigated whether growth in bilingual proficiency, as shown by an increased number of translation equivalents (TEs) over a 7-month period, improves executive function. We hypothesized that bilingual toddlers with a larger increase of TEs would have more practice in switching across lexical systems, boosting executive function abilities. Expressive vocabulary and TEs were assessed at 24 and 31 months of age. A battery of tasks, including conflict, delay, and working memory tasks, was administered at 31 months. As expected, we observed a task-specific advantage in inhibitory control in bilinguals. More important, within the bilingual group, larger increases in the number of TEs predicted better performance on conflict tasks but not on delay tasks. This unique longitudinal design confirms the relation between executive function and early bilingualism.