Peter de Villiers

Smith College · Psychology

Music is universally prevalent in human society and is a salient component of the lives of young families. Here, we studied the frequency of singing and playing recorded music in the home using surveys of parents with infants ( N = 945). We found that most parents sing to their infant on a daily basis and the frequency of infant-directed singing is...

Music is universally prevalent in human society and is a salient component of the lives of young families. Here, we studied the frequency of singing and playing recorded music in the home using surveys of parents with infants (N = 945). We found that most parents sing to their infant on a daily basis, and the frequency of infant-directed singing is...

The structure of executive function (EF), as it pertains to distinct “hot” (affectively salient) and “cool” (affectively neutral) dimensions, in early childhood is not well understood. Given that the neural circuitry underlying EF may become increasingly differentiated with development and enriched experiences, EF may become more dissociable into h...

This article looks closely at two types of errors children have been shown to make with universal quantification—Exhaustive Pairing (EP) errors and Underexhaustive errors—and asks whether they reflect the same underlying phenomenon. In a large-scale, longitudinal study, 140 children were tested 4 times from ages 4 to 7 on sentences involving the un...

This article reports findings from a cluster-randomized study of an integrated literacy- and math-focused preschool curriculum, comparing versions with and without an explicit socioemotional lesson component to a business-as-usual condition. Participants included 110 classroom teachers from randomized classrooms and approximately eight students fro...

Various arguments are reviewed about the claim that language development is critically connected to the development of theory of mind. The different theories of how language could help in this process of development are explored. A brief account is provided of the controversy over the capacities of infants to read others' false beliefs. Then the em...

Despite reports of positive effects of high-quality child care, few experimental studies have examined the process of improving low-quality center-based care for toddler-age children. In this article, we report intervention effects on child care teachers' behaviors and children's social, emotional, behavioral, early literacy, language, and math out...

This volume synthesizes and integrates the broad literature in the subdisciplines of developmental psychology. The volume features an opening chapter by the volume editor outlining the organization of the field, as well as a concluding chapter in which the volume editor outlines future directions for developmental psychology. This volume synthesize...

Puts forth a radical proposition about the relationship between language and the understanding of false beliefs. It begins by contrasting the roles that language acquisition might play with respect to the development of theory of mind reasoning, separating out the language-for-the-task from the social constructivist view of language as one of sever...

In the United States, as in all countries of the world in which English is widely spoken, there exist different dialects or variants of the language. These dialects are often defined by regional or cultural groups and may vary from each other in one or more of several aspects of the language - phonology, morphology, syntax, lexical semantics, or pr...

This study compared the development of essential elements of narrative skill in children from African American English (AAE)- and general American English (GAE)-speaking communities using an innovative elicitation and evaluation protocol consisting of four key indices of narrative language: (a) reference contrasting, (b) temporal expressions, (c) m...

Deception is a controversial aspect of theory of mind, and researchers disagree about whether it entails an understanding of the false beliefs of one's opponent. The present study asks whether children with delayed language and delayed explicit false belief reasoning can succeed on explicit deception tasks. Participants were 45 orally taught deaf c...

The paper presents a feature-checking theory of wh-movement that attempts to accommodate both adult grammar and the path of acquisition by which children handle long distance movement, indirect questions and partial movement. Partial movement is not a grammatical option in English but it is adopted as an option in development. The account makes sev...

This review addresses questions of what should be assessed in language acquisition, and how to do it. The design of a language assessment is crucially connected to its purpose, whether for diagnosis, development of an intervention plan, or for research. Precise profiles of language strengths and weaknesses are required for clear definitions of the...

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In 1995 we proposed that certain aspects of grammatical development may be necessary for children to achieve understanding of other people’s false beliefs (J. de Villiers, 1995; de Villiers and de Villiers, 2000). In this chapter we review the theory on which the proposal was built, how the proposal itself has been modified over the years, and the...

Theory-of-mind (ToM) abilities were studied in 176 deaf children aged 3 years 11 months to 8 years 3 months who use either American Sign Language (ASL) or oral English, with hearing parents or deaf parents. A battery of tasks tapping understanding of false belief and knowledge state and language skills, ASL or English, was given to each child. Ther...

Barbara Zurer Pearson is a research associate, project manager in the Communication Disorders department of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She received her B.A. in French from Middlebury College, her M.S. in TESOL from Florida International University, and her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics (Interdepartmental) from the University of Miami,...

This chapter discusses language and theory of mind (ToM) development from the perspective of deaf children. Children provide a strong test of a causal role for language in ToM development. Many deaf children have significantly delayed language acquisition, but they have age-appropriate nonverbal intelligence and active sociability. In this chapter...

In developing a test of pragmatic skills for children ages 4 to 9 years, we focused on a number of functional language skills that are important for children's success in early schooling and for the development of fluent reading and writing. They included (1) wh-question asking, (2) communicative role taking, (3) linking events in a cohesive narrat...

We argue that natural language has the right degree of representational richness for false belief reasoning, especially the complements under verbs of communication and belief. Language may indeed be necessary synchronically for cross-modular reasoning, but certain achievements in language seem necessary at least diachronically for explicit reasoni...

Normally hearing students acquire most of their reading vocabulary from printed context, but little is known about this process in hearing-impaired students. Two studies, therefore, investigated hearing-impaired students' ability to derive lexical and syntactic information about unknown words embedded in short passages of text. The passages varied...

Argues that the central role of discourse and communicative function in language development has profound implications for assessment of English syntax acquisition by hearing-impaired children. Pragmatics is not just an additional aspect of English that must be assessed, but rather pragmatic considerations must be central to the assessment of synta...

The article discusses acquisition of five aspects of English beyond the basic simple sentence (inflections and modulations of meaning, negation, passive sentences, coordination, and relative clauses) and considers implications for hearing impaired students. Ways in which syntax interacts with pragmatic and semantic factors are analyzed. (CL)

Rats' responses on two levers were followed by 3.5 sec access to milk according to concurrent variable-interval schedules. In addition, presses on the left or the right lever avoided shocks according to a third, independent, variable-interval schedule. The rats pressed the lever that both delivered food and avoided shock relatively more frequently...

In two experiments, pigeons' key pecking for food on concurrent variable-interval schedules was punished with electric shock according to concurrent variable-interval punishment schedules. With unequal frequencies of food but equal rates of punishment associated with the two keys and at several intensities of shock, the response and time allocation...

This investigation studied the development of the form and function of negative sentences, and how it relates to the input on negation that children receive from their parents. The data came from three children: two from a previous study (Bellugi) and one the son of the investigators. A detailed analysis was carried out of the syntactic form and se...

After pretraining with multiple variable-interval avoidance schedules, two rats were exposed to a series of concurrent variable-interval avoidance schedules. Responses on two levers cancelled delivery of electric shocks arranged according to two independent variable-interval schedules. The ratio of responses and time spent on the two levers approxi...

A review of approximately 40 experiments on rats, monkeys, pigeons, and, in one case, human beings has found functional relations between some parameter of reinforcement and some measure of response strength. With few exceptions, the obtained functions fit the same mathematical form: Strength of responding appears to be proportional to its relative...

The development of comprehension and production of spatial deictic terms “this/that”, “here/there”, “my/your”, and “in front of/behind” was investigated in the context of a hide-and-seek game. The first three contrasts are produced according to the speaker's perspective, so comprehension requires a nonegocentric viewpoint. The contrast “in front of...

In a study with 90 undergraduates it was found that the use of definite articles in a set of 17 sentences facilitated the connection of those sentences into a theme or story in memory. Those Ss who recalled the passage as a story remembered significantly more words and sentences and made more theme-related word substitutions in both immediate and l...

The notion of competence as it applies to child language is critically assessed in the light of evidence collected from a number of linguistic performances which share the same word-order rule. These performances – production, comprehension, judgment and correction – parallel Moravcsik's (1969) formulation of Chomsky's criteria for tacit knowledge...

Subjects were asked to correct the meaning of semantically anomalous sentences in which a noun, either the subject or object, or the verb could be considered anomalous. Increased specificity of reference led to an increase in the salience of the nouns in the meaning of the sentences. A noun was significantly more likely to be retained in the correc...

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the quantitative relationship between response rate and reinforcement frequency in single and multiple variable-interval avoidance schedules. Responses cancelled delivery of shocks that were scheduled by variable-interval schedules. When shock-frequency reduction was taken as the measure of reinforcemen...

Thirty-three children aged between 19 and 38 months were presented with six reversible active and six reversible passive sentences and were required to act them out. For each child, mean length of utterance was calculated from a sample of spontaneous speech. Mean length of utterance was a more consistent predictor of performance than chronological...

Speech samples were taken from 21 children aged 16-40 months covering a wide range of mean utterance length. Presence or absence of 14 grammatical morphemes in linguistic and nonlinguistic obligatory contexts was scored. Order of acquisition of the morphemes was determined using two different criteria. The rank-orderings obtained correlated very hi...

One effect of pairing a stimulus with an aversive electric shock is to impart to that stimulus the subsequent power to suppress ongoing positively reinforced instrumental behavior. Partly because of its defining operations and partly because of a certain theoretical view of its character, Hunt and Brady (1951) revived Watson and Raynor's (1920) ter...

Judgments of the acceptability of correct, word order reversed, and semantically anomalous sentences were elicited from 2- and 3-year-old children in a game played with hand puppets. All of the sentences used were simple imperatives and each child was asked to correct those he called "wrong". Performance on the judgment task was correlated with eac...

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the interaction between response rate and reinforcement frequency in multiple random-interval avoidance schedules. Responses cancelled delivery of shocks that could be scheduled at different random intervals in each component. When shock-frequency reduction was taken as the measure of reinforcement, the...

Three rats were trained to lever press on concurrent random interval 2-min random interval 2-min schedules of milk reinforcement. With a 5-sec changeover delay, relative response rate matched the relative reinforcement duration associated with each lever. A stimulus, during which unavoidable shocks occurred at random intervals, was superimposed on...

Two experiments were performed to investigate the interaction of baseline appetitive drive and incentive on the conditioned suppression of instrumental behavior exhibited in the presence of a preaversive stimulus. In one experiment, suppression of lever pressing of rats working on an intermittent food reinforcement schedule was considerably enhance...

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