Gert Westermann

Lancaster University | LU · Department of Psychology

Infants rapidly learn both linguistic and nonlinguistic representations of their environment, and begin to link these from around six months. While there is an increasing body of evidence for the effect of labels heard in-task on infants’ online processing, whether infants’ learned linguistic representations shape learned nonlinguistic representati...

How do infants’ emerging language abilities affect their organization of objects into categories? The question of whether labels can shape the early perceptual categories formed by young infants has received considerable attention, but evidence has remained inconclusive. Here, 10-month-old infants (N = 80) were familiarized with a series of morphed...

An influential view of the nature of the language system is that of an evolved biological system in which a set of rules is combined with a lexicon that contains the words of the language together with a representation of their context. Alternative views, usually based on connectionist modeling, attempt to explain the structure of language on the b...

The human pupil is a small opening in each eye that dilates in response not only to changes in luminance but also to novel events. This makes changes in pupil diameter an attractive measure in studies on infants’ and young children’s physical and social cognition. However, designing and interpreting pupillometry studies for developmental population...

We present a neural network model of learning and processing the English past tense that is based on the notion that experience-dependent cortical development is a core aspect of cognitive development. During learning the model adds and removes units and connections to develop a task-specific final architecture. The model provides an integrated acc...

The current study investigated how metacognitive abilities such as Knowledge Confidence (subjective prior knowledge estimate) and Correctness Confidence (appraisal of the likelihood of closing the gap) relate to curiosity, and examined the roles of these metacognitive measures and curiosity in learning. Using a blurred picture paradigm in which par...

Previous work has found that shy children show chance‐level disambiguation and retention of novel word meanings in a typical lab‐based word learning task. This effect could be explained in terms of shy children's aversion to unfamiliarity disrupting the requisite attentional processes, because the task is marked by a high degree of unfamiliarity. T...

Deux idées principales apparaissent dans l’associationnisme radical unifié de Rey : 1) l’utilisation de l’apprentissage hebbien comme cadre computationnel unifié dans la science psychologique, 2) l’utilisation des associations comme une construction unique pour rendre compte des activités mentales. Il a été démontré que l’apprentissage hebbien rend...

This paper presents rational inattention as a new, transdiagnostic theory of information seeking in neurodevelopmental conditions that have uneven cognitive and socio‐emotional profiles, including developmental language disorder (DLD), dyslexia, dyscalculia and autism. Rational inattention holds that the optimal solution to minimizing epistemic unc...

Humans are curious. Especially children are known for their drive to explore and learn, which is crucial for developing in and navigating through our complex world. Naturally, some children may be more curious than others, leading to differences in how they structure their own learning experiences, subsequently impacting their developmental traject...

Children actively and selectively transmit information to others based on the type of information and the context during learning. Four‐ to 7‐year‐old children preferentially transmit generalizable information in teaching‐like contexts. Although 2‐year‐old children are able to distinguish between generalizable and non‐generalizable information, it...

Infants explore the world around them based on their intrinsically motivated curiosity. However, the cognitive mechanisms underlying such curiosity-driven exploratory behaviour remain largely unknown. Here, infants could freely explore two novel categories, triggering a new exemplar from a category by fixating on either of the two associated areas...

Word learning depends on attention – children must focus on the right things at the right times. However, autistic children often display restricted interests, limiting their intake of stimuli during word learning. This study investigates how category interests influence word learning in autism and neurotypical development. Autistic and neurotypica...

Auditory perceptual deficits are widely observed among children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Yet, the nature of these deficits and the extent to which they explain speech and language problems remain controversial. In this study, we hypothesize that disruption to the maturation of the basilar membrane may impede the optimization of t...

Previous research has shown that shyness affects children's attention during the fast-mapping of novel words via disambiguation. The current study examined whether shyness also affects children's attention when eye-gaze cues to novel word meanings are present. 20-to 26-month-old children's (N = 31) gaze was recorded as they viewed videos in which a...

A large body of research based on a specific stimulus set (dinosaur/fish) has argued that auditory labels and novel communicative signals (such as beeps used in a communicative context) facilitate category formation in infants, that such effects can be attributed to the auditory signals' communicative nature, and that other auditory stimuli have no...

This paper presents rational inattention as a new, transdiagnostic theory of information seeking in neurodevelopmental conditions including developmental language disorder (DLD), dyslexia, dyscalculia, and autism. Rational inattention holds that the optimal solution to minimizing epistemic uncertainty is to avoid imprecise information sources. The...

Much of our basic understanding of cognitive and social processes in infancy relies on measures of looking time, and specifically on infants’ visual preference for a novel or familiar stimulus. However, despite being the foundation of many behavioral tasks in infant research, the determinants of infants’ visual preferences are poorly understood, an...

Language processing in humans has long been proposed to rely on sophisticated learning abilities including statistical learning. Endress and Johnson (E&J, 2021) recently presented a neural network model for statistical learning based on Hebbian learning principles. This model accounts for word segmentation tasks, one primary paradigm in statistical...

The effect of interpersonal behavioral synchrony on children’s behavior is an emerging field rich with research potential. While studies demonstrate its effect on affiliative and prosocial outcomes, the role of synchronized movement on children’s specific learning outcomes has not yet been investigated experimentally. One possibility is that synchr...

The current study investigated how metacognitive abilities such as Knowledge Confidence (subjective prior knowledge estimate) and Correctness Confidence (appraisal of the likelihood of closing the gap) relate to curiosity, and examined the roles of these metacognitive measures and curiosity in learning. Using a blurred picture paradigm in which par...

In January 2021, we published an article titled “Predictive Processing and Developmental Language Disorder” in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research . The current commentary provides an important extension to this work. Specifically, we aim to head off the suggestion that a child's “predictive capacity” may be trained independently...

Recent research with adults indicates that curiosity induced by uncertainty enhances learning and memory outcomes and that the resolution of curiosity has a special role in curiosity-driven learning. However, the role of curiosity-based learning in early development is unclear. Here we presented 8-month-old infants with a novel looking time procedu...

In January 2021 we published a viewpoint article entitled ‘Predictive processing and developmental language disorder’ (DLD) in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. The current commentary provides an important extension to this work. Specifically, we aim to head off the suggestion that a child’s ‘predictive capacity’ may be trained...

Developmental language disorder (DLD) affects 7.5% of children and involves language deficits in the absence of any clear biomedical cause. In this paper, we present a new theory of the sentence comprehension and production deficits that characterise DLD, but which remain poorly understood. Stated plainly, our hypothesis is that children with DLD s...

Others' emotional expressions affect individuals' attention allocation in social interactions, which are integral to the process of word learning. However, the impact of perceived emotions on word learning is not well understood. Two eye‐tracking experiments investigated 78 British toddlers' (37 girls) of 29‐ to 31‐month‐old retention of novel labe...

Dominant theoretical accounts of developmental language disorder (DLD) commonly invoke working memory capacity limitations. In the current report, we present an alternative view: That working memory in DLD is not under-resourced but overloaded due to operating on speech representations with low discriminability. This account is developed through co...

Yarkoni's analysis clearly articulates a number of concerns limiting the generalizability and explanatory power of psychological findings, many of which are compounded in infancy research. ManyBabies addresses these concerns via a radically collaborative, large-scale and open approach to research that is grounded in theory-building, committed to di...

This is a Registered Report, in-principle acceptance, to appear in Developmental Science. Abstract: The cognitive mechanisms and benefits of active learning in early child development are poorly understood. The current study will investigate 18-month-old infants’ curiosity-driven information selection in a novel word learning task, designed to iden...

This is a Stage 1 Registered Report granted In-Principle Acceptance to appear in Developmental Science. Abstract: Children actively and selectively transmit information to others based on the type of information and the context during learning. Four- to 7-year-old children preferentially transmit generalizable information in teaching-like context...

Gaze following is an early-emerging skill in infancy argued to be fundamental to joint attention and later language development. However, how gaze following emerges is a topic of great debate. Representational theories assume that in order to follow adults’ gaze, infants must have a rich sensitivity to adults’ communicative intention from birth. In...

Scale errors are observed when young children make mistakes by attempting to put their bodies into miniature versions of everyday objects. Such errors have been argued to arise from children's insufficient integration of size into their object representations. The current study investigated whether Japanese and UK children's (18-24 months old, N =...

Brain imaging studies of English past tense inflection have found dissociations between regular and irregular verbs, but no coherent picture has emerged to explain how these dissociations arise. Here we use synthetic brain imaging on a neural network model to provide a mechanistic account of the origins of such dissociations. The model suggests tha...

Dominant theoretical accounts of developmental language disorder (DLD) are unanimous in assuming working memory capacity limitations. In the current report, we present an alternative view: That working memory in DLD is not under-resourced but overloaded due to operating on speech representations with low discriminability. This account is developed...

Recent research with adults indicates that curiosity induced by uncertainty enhances learning and memory outcomes, and that the resolution of curiosity has a special role in curiosity-driven learning. However, the role of curiosity-based learning in early development is unclear. Here we presented 8-month-old infants with a novel looking time proced...

Yarkoni’s analysis clearly articulates a number of concerns limiting the generalizability and explanatory power of psychological findings, many of which are compounded in infancy research. ManyBabies addresses these concerns via a radically collaborative, large-scale and open approach to research that is grounded in theory-building, committed to di...

Purpose Research in the cognitive and neural sciences has situated predictive processing—the anticipation of upcoming percepts—as a dominant function of the brain. The purpose of this article is to argue that prediction should feature more prominently in explanatory accounts of sentence processing and comprehension deficits in developmental languag...

In the present chapter, we review the state of the cognitive developmental research on the topics of curiosity, wonder and creativity, with a special focus on successful methodological approaches, as well as challenges for the experimental study of their cognitive underpinnings. The chapter comprises four main sections: 1) Curiosity, where we focus...

In the present chapter, we review the state of the cognitive developmental research on the topics of curiosity, wonder and creativity, with a special focus on successful methodological approaches, as well as challenges for the experimental study of their cognitive underpinnings. The chapter comprises four main sections: 1) Curiosity, where we focus...

Research in the cognitive and neural sciences has situated predictive processing – the anticipation of upcoming stimuli – as a dominant function of the brain. However, predictive processing does not currently feature in any explanatory account of sentence processing and comprehension deficits in children with developmental language disorder (DLD)....

Children are sensitive to both social and non-social aspects of the learning environment. Among social cues, pedagogical communication has been shown to not only play a role in children’s learning, but also in their own active transmission of knowledge. Vredenburgh et al. (2015) showed that 2-year-olds are more likely to demonstrate an action to a...

Children are sensitive to both social and non‐social aspects of the learning environment. Among social cues, pedagogical communication has been shown to not only play a role in children's learning, but also in their own active transmission of knowledge. Vredenburgh, Kushnir and Casasola (2015) showed that 2‐year‐olds are more likely to demonstrate...

Active social communication is an effective way for infants to learn about the world. Do pre‐verbal and pre‐pointing infants seek epistemic information from their social partners when motivated to obtain information they cannot discover independently? The present study investigated whether 12‐month‐olds (N = 30) selectively seek information from kn...

Gaze following is an early-emerging skill in infancy argued to be fundamental to joint attention and later language. However, how gaze following emerges has been a topic of great debate. The most widely-accepted developmental theories suggest that infants are able to gaze follow only by understanding shared attention. Another group of theories sugg...

In this series of experiments, we tested the limits of young infants’ word learning and generalization abilities in light of recent findings reporting sophisticated word learning abilities in the first year of life. Ten-month-old infants were trained with two word-object pairs and tested with either the same or different members of the correspondin...

Infants are not passive recipients of information but are curious learners who explore their world based on their intrinsic motivation. We review the main theories of the mechanisms underlying curiosity – the search for information for its own sake – and the means by which infants explore their environment, ranging from visual examination of object...

Thirty 30-month-old toddlers participated a screen-based word learning task in which they were taught novel words in neutral, positive and negative affect. This two-day study consisted of a referent selection (RS) phase followed by two retention phases (RT1 & RT2). RT1 after a five-minute break and RT2 on the following day to examine longer-term re...

We have developed a neurocomputational model that uses associative learning as a domain-general mechanism to learn from environmental regularities. The model incorporates long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD), based on biological descriptions of synaptic adaptation, to capture the structure of the environment. This model highl...

In a seminal study, Yoon, Johnson and Csibra [PNAS, 105, 36 (2008)] showed that nine-month-old infants retained qualitatively different information about novel objects in communicative and non-communicative contexts. In a communicative context, the infants encoded the identity of novel objects at the expense of encoding their location, which was pr...

In a seminal study, Yoon, Johnson and Csibra [PNAS, 105, 36 (2008)] showed that nine-month-old infants retained qualitatively different information about novel objects in communicative and non-communicative contexts. In a communicative context, the infants encoded the identity of novel objects at the expense of encoding their location, which was pr...

The current study tests the hypothesis that shy children's reduced word learning is partly due to an effect of shyness on attention during object labeling. A sample of 20-and 26-month-old children (N = 32) took part in a looking-while-listening task in which they saw sets of familiar and novel objects while hearing familiar or novel labels. Overall...

All the toddlers firstly learned novel label-object mappings in affectively neutral, positive and negative conditions in a referent selection training phase, then were tested whether they retained the label-object mappings and affection-object mappings in a retention testing phases after five minutes break followed referent selection and also on th...

The effect of labels on non-linguistic representations is the focus of substantial theoretical debate in the developmental literature. A recent empirical study demonstrated that ten-month-old infants respond differently to objects for which they know a label relative to unlabeled objects. One account of these results is that infants’ label represen...

[Accepted at Infant Behavior and Development] In a seminal study, Yoon, Johnson and Csibra [PNAS, 105, 36 (2008)] showed that nine-month-old infants retained qualitatively different information about novel objects in communicative and non-communicative contexts. In a communicative context, the infants encoded the identity of novel objects at the ex...

Infants learn from social communication, and ostensive-referential communication is argued to be pivotal in this respect. Yoon, Johnson and Csibra (2008) found that after viewing a communicative scene, 9-month-olds detected object identity changes more than object location changes. But after viewing a non-communicative scene, infants detected objec...

To account for infants' perceptual and cognitive development, the constructivist model proposes that learning a new object depends on the capability of processing simpler lower-level units, and then integrating these units into more complex higher-level units based on their relationships, such as regular co-occurrence. Here, we demonstrate that the...

Decades of research demonstrate that infants’ learning is sensitive to task features. However, what level of complexity best supports learning is unclear. Moreover, infancy studies work typically employ carefully-designed experiments with complexity determined a priori. Whether infants systematically generate a particular level of difficulty during...

Infants are curious learners who drive their own cognitive development by imposing structure on their learning environment as they explore. Understanding the mechanisms by which infants structure their own learning is therefore critical to our understanding of development. Here we propose an explicit mechanism for intrinsically motivated informatio...

A stimulus class can be composed of perceptually different but functionally equivalent stimuli. The relations between the stimuli that are grouped in a class can be learned or derived from other stimulus relations. If stimulus A is equivalent to B, and B is equivalent to C, then the equivalence between A and C can be derived without explicit traini...

Variability is prevalent in early language acquisition, however whether it supports or hinders learning is unclear: while target variability has been shown to facilitate word learning, variability in competitor items has been shown to make the task harder. Here we tested whether background variability could boost learning in a referent selection ta...

Children are growing up in a digital age with increasing exposure to television and touchscreen devices. We tested whether exposure to screen media is associated with children’s early language development. One hundred and thirty-one highly educated caregivers of UK children aged 6–36 months completed a media exposure questionnaire and vocabulary me...

Variability is important in language acquisition; however, whether it supports or hinders learning is unclear: while 3D object studies suggest that children learn word-object mappings better when the object varies, storybook studies indicate that variability in the context in which new objects are shown impairs learning. We tested a dynamic systems...

Variability is prevalent in early language acquisition, however, whether it supports or hinders learning is unclear: while target variability has been shown to support word learning, variability in competitor items has been shown to make the task harder. Here we tested whether background variability could boost learning in a referent selection task...