Michael C. Frank's research while affiliated with Stanford University and other places
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Publications (310)
Test-retest reliability — establishing that measurements remain consistent across multiple testing sessions — is critical to measuring, understanding, and predicting individual differences in infant language development. However, previous attempts to establish measurement reliability in infant speech perception tasks are limited, and reliability of...
Head-mounted cameras have been used in developmental psychology research for more than a decade to provide a rich and comprehensive view of what infants see during their everyday experiences. However, variation between these devices has limited the field's ability to compare results across studies and across labs. Further, the video data captured b...
What makes a word easy to learn? Early-learned words are frequent and tend to name concrete referents. But words typically do not occur in isolation. Some words are predictable from their contexts; others are less so. Here, we investigate whether predictability relates to when children start producing different words (age of acquisition; AoA). We o...
Registered Reports (RRs) are an emerging format for publishing empirical journal articles in which the decision to publish an article is based on sound conceptualization, methods, and planned analyses rather than the specific nature of the results. This article introduces the Special Section on Registered Reports in Child Development by describing...
Interpreting a seemingly-simple function word like "or", "behind", or "more" can require logical, numerical, and relational reasoning. How are such words learned by children? Prior acquisition theories have often relied on positing a foundation of innate knowledge. Yet recent neural-network based visual question answering models apparently can lear...
What makes a word easy to learn? Early-learned words are frequent and tend to name concrete referents. But words typically do not occur in isolation. Some words are predictable from their contexts; others less so. Here, we investigate whether predictability relates to when children start producing different words (Age of Acquisition; AoA). We opera...
Culture is a key determinant of children’s development both in its own right and for understanding the generalizability of developmental phenomena. Studying the role of culture in development requires information about participants’ demographic backgrounds. However, both reporting and treatment of demographic data are limited and inconsistent in ch...
Large language models (LLMs) show intriguing emergent behaviors, yet they receive around four or five orders of magnitude more language data than human children. What accounts for this vast difference in sample efficiency? Candidate explanations include children's pre-existing conceptual knowledge, their use of multimodal grounding, and the interac...
The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of big team science (BTS), endeavours where a comparatively large number of researchers pool their intellectual and/or material resources in pursuit of a common goal. Despite this burgeoning interest, there exists little guidance on how to create, manage and participate in these collaborations. In this...
From birth, humans make decisions about what to look at and for how long. A classic framework proposes encoding as a key driver of looking behavior in development - in early stages of encoding, infants and young children prefer to engage with familiar stimuli, while at later stages of encoding they prefer novel stimuli. Though this framework is oft...
Young children acquire a wide range of linguistic and cognitive skills in the first three years of life. Decades of experimental work have established a solid empirical foundation for our understanding of cognitive development. But most experimental studies are limited in statistical power and focus on specific psychological constructs, thus making...
In many cultures, adults use simple, slow, and dynamic speech when talking to infants ("parentese," or infant-directed speech) and make expansive, repetitive movements when demonstrating object properties to infants ("motionese," or infant-directed actions). These modifications enhance infants' attention to and learning about language and goal-dire...
The acquisition of emotion words is critical to children’s socio-emotional development. Previous studies report that children acquire emotion words gradually during ages 3–5 and beyond. The majority of this work, however, has used demanding tasks for young children (e.g., asking children to label emotion-related facial configurations) and has predo...
Pragmatic abilities are fundamental to successful language use and learning. Individual differences studies contribute to understanding the psychological processes involved in pragmatic reasoning. Small sample sizes, insufficient measurement tools, and a lack of theoretical precision have hindered progress, however. Three studies addressed these ch...
The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of Big Team Science (BTS), endeavours where a comparatively large number of researchers pool their intellectual and/or material resources in pursuit of a common goal. Despite this burgeoning interest, there exists little guidance on how to create, manage, and participate in these collaborations. In this...
In order for children to understand and reason about the world in an adult-like fashion, they need to learn that conceptual categories are organized in a hierarchical fashion (e.g., a dog is also an animal). While children learn from their first-hand observation of the world, social knowledge transmission via language can also play an important rol...
Negation is a fundamental element of language and logical systems, but processing negative sentences can be challenging. Early investigations suggested that this difficulty was due to the representational challenge of adding an additional logical element to a proposition. In more recent work, however, supportive contexts mitigate the processing cos...
The recent proliferation of big team science is forcing researchers to revisit three issues around authorship: (1) What is an authorship-worthy contribution, (2) How should contributions be documented, and (3) How should disagreements among large teams of co-authors be handled?
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...
Negation is a fundamental element of language and logical systems, but processing negative sentences can be challenging. Early investigations suggested that this difficulty was due to the representational challenge of adding an additional logical element to a proposition. In more recent work, however, supportive contexts mitigate the processing cos...
Culture is a key determinant of children’s development both in its own right and for understanding the generalizability of developmental phenomena. Studying the role of culture in development requires information about participants’ demographic backgrounds. However, both reporting and treatment of demographic data are limited and inconsistent in ch...
Cultural differences between the US and China have been investigated using a broad array of psychological tasks measuring differences between cognition, language, perception, and reasoning. We examine the robustness of several classic experimental paradigms in cross-cultural psychology. Using online convenience samples of adults, we conducted two l...
Children's early language skill has been linked to later educational outcomes, making it important to measure early language accurately. Parent‐reported instruments, such as the Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs), have been shown to provide reliable and valid measures of children's aggregate early language skill. However, CDIs contain hun...
Pragmatics is foundational to language use and learning. Computational cognitive models have been successfully used to predict pragmatic phenomena in adults and children – on an aggregate level. It is unclear if they can be used to predict behavior on an individual level. We address this question in children (N = 60, 3- to 5-year-olds), taking adva...
An increasing number of psychological experiments with children are being conducted using online platforms, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Individual replications have compared the findings of particular experiments online and in-person, but the general effect of online data collection on data collected from children is still unknown. Theref...
What are the constraints, cues, and mechanisms that help learners create successful word-meaning mappings? This study takes up linguistic disjunction and looks at cues and mechanisms that can help children learn the meaning of or. We first used a large corpus of parent-child interactions to collect statistics on or uses. Children started producing...
Head-mounted cameras have been used in developmental psychology research for more than a decade to provide a rich and comprehensive view of what infants see during their everyday experiences. However, variation between these devices has limited the field’s ability to compare results across studies and across labs. Further, the video data captured b...
From birth, humans constantly make decisions about what to look at and for how long. Yet, the mechanism behind such decision‐making remains poorly understood. Here, we present the rational action, noisy choice for habituation (RANCH) model. RANCH is a rational learning model that takes noisy perceptual samples from stimuli and makes sampling decisi...
The faces and hands of caregivers and other social partners offer a rich source of social and causal information that is likely critical for infants' cognitive and linguistic development. Previous work using manual annotation strategies and cross-sectional data has found systematic changes in the proportion of faces and hands in the egocentric pers...
Children’s drawings of common object categories become dramatically more recognizable across development. What are the major factors that explain this developmental change? Here we examined the degree to which these developmental changes in recognizability vary across different drawing tasks (i.e. drawing from observation vs. from memory), geograph...
Open science policies have proliferated in the social and behavioral sciences in recent years, including practices around sharing study designs, protocols, and data and preregistering hypotheses. Developmental research has moved more slowly than some other disciplines in adopting open science practices, in part because developmental science is ofte...
The ability to rapidly recognize words and link them to referents is central to children’s early language development. This ability, often called word recognition in the developmental literature, is typically studied in the looking-while-listening paradigm, which measures infants’ fixation on a target object (vs. a distractor) after hearing a targe...
Is a cow more closely related to grass or to a chicken? Responses vary by culture and age, among other factors. Those from western societies (or independent-leaning regions within interdependent non-western societies) are more likely to endorse the taxonomic match, the chicken, over the thematic match, grass (Chiu, 1972; Talhelm et al., 2014). This...
The notion of equality (identity) is simple and ubiquitous, making it a key case study for broader questions about the representations supporting abstract relational reasoning. Previous work suggested that neural networks were not suitable models of human relational reasoning because they could not represent mathematically identity, the most basic...
Infancy researchers often use highly simplified, animated, or otherwise artificial stimuli to study infant’s understanding of abstract concepts including “causality” or even “prosociality”. The use of these simplified stimuli have led to questions about the validity of the resulting empirical findings. Do simplified stimuli effectively communicate...
Pragmatics is foundational to language use and learning. Computational cognitive models have been successfully used to predict pragmatic phenomena in adults and children -- on an aggregate level. It is unclear if they can be used to predict behavior on an individual level. We address this question in children (N = 60, 3- to 5-year-olds), taking adv...
The linguistic input children receive across early childhood plays a crucial role in shaping their knowledge about the world. To study this input, researchers have begun applying distributional semantic models to large corpora of child‐directed speech, extracting various patterns of word use/co‐occurrence. Previous work using these models has not m...
Syntactic adaptation may be a key mechanism underlying children’s learning of novel words. Havron et al. (2019) exposed French-speaking children (ages 3 to 4) to a speaker biased toward using either familiar verbs or familiar nouns in a syntactic context which permitted both structures. This prime later influenced participants’ interpretations of a...
Purpose
Measuring the growth of young children's vocabulary is important for researchers seeking to understand language learning as well as for clinicians aiming to identify early deficits. The MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) are parent report instruments that offer a reliable and valid method for measuring early produc...
From birth, humans constantly make decisions about what to look at and for how long. Yet the mechanism behind such decision-making remains poorly understood. Here we present the rational action, noisy choice for habituation (RANCH) model. RANCH is a rational learning model that takes noisy perceptual samples from stimuli and makes sampling decision...
Children's early language skill has been linked to later educational outcomes, making it important to measure early language accurately. Parent-reported instruments such as the Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) have been shown to provide reliable and valid measures of children's aggregate early language skill. However, CDIs contain hundr...
In recent years, open science policies have proliferated in the social and behavioral sciences, including sharing of study designs, protocols, and data as well as pre-registration of hypotheses. Developmental research has moved more slowly than some other disciplines in adopting open science practices, in part because not all developmental science...
In order for children to understand and reason about the world in an adult-like fashion, they need to learn that conceptual categories are organized in a hierarchical fashion (e.g., a dog is also an animal). The caregiver’s linguistic input can play an important role in this learning, and previous studies have documented several cues in parental ta...
Previous studies report that children acquire emotion words gradually during ages 3-5 and beyond (e.g., Widen, 2013). Most of this work, however, has used tasks that are demanding for young children (e.g., asking children to produce emotion labels in a free-labeling task), and has asked children to map emotion labels to facial configurations alone....
From classrooms to dinner parties, many of our everyday conversations take place in larger groups where speakers address multiple listeners at once. Such multiparty settings raise a number of challenges for classical theories of communication, which largely focus on dyadic interactions. In this study, we investigated how speakers adapt their referr...
Pragmatic abilities are fundamental to successful language use and learning. Individual differences studies contribute to understanding the psychological processes involved in pragmatic reasoning. Small sample sizes, insufficient measurement tools, and a lack of theoretical precision have hindered progress, however. Three studies addressed these ch...
Languages are powerful solutions to coordination problems: They provide stable, shared expectations about how the words we say correspond to the beliefs and intentions in our heads. Yet, language use in a variable and nonstationary social environment requires linguistic representations to be flexible: Old words acquire new ad hoc or partner-specifi...
Language is learned in complex social settings where listeners must reconstruct speakers' intended meanings from context. To navigate this challenge, children can use pragmatic reasoning to learn the meaning of unfamiliar words. A critical challenge for pragmatic reasoning is that it requires integrating multiple information sources, which have typ...
What is the best way to estimate the size of important effects? Should we aggregate across disparate findings using statistical meta-analysis, or instead run large, multi-laboratory replications (MLR)? A recent paper by Kvarven, Strømland and Johannesson (Kvarven et al. 2020 Nat. Hum. Behav. 4, 423-434. (doi:10.1038/s41562-019-0787-z)) compared eff...
Meta-analyses are costly to conduct, often impossible to reanalyze, and outdated as soon as a new study emerges. How can we lower these hurdles, make data more accessible to researchers, and transform meta-analyses into a living resource? MetaLab (https://metalab.stanford.edu/) is an interactive platform that hosts community-augmented meta-analyses...
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...
The COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting closure of daycare centers worldwide, led to unprecedented changes in children’s learning environments. This period of increased time at home with caregivers, with limited access to external sources (e.g., daycares) provides a unique opportunity to examine the associations between the caregiver-child activit...
The ability to rapidly recognize words and link them to referents is central to children’s early language development. This ability, often called word recognition in the developmental literature, is typically studied in the looking-while-listening paradigm, which measures infants’ fixation on a target object (vs. a distractor) after hearing a targe...
A standard model is a theoretical framework that synthesizes observables into a quantitative consensus. Have researchers made progress toward this kind of synthesis for children’s early language learning? Many computational models of early vocabulary learning assume that individual words are learned through an accumulation of environmental input. T...
How do postural developments affect infants’ access to social information? We recorded egocentric and third‐person video while infants and their caregivers (N = 36, 8‐ to 16‐month‐olds, N = 19 females) participated in naturalistic play sessions. We then validated the use of a neural network pose detection model to detect faces and hands in the infa...
Online data collection methods are expanding the ease and access of developmental research for researchers and participants alike. While its popularity among developmental scientists has soared during the COVID-19 pandemic, its potential goes beyond just a means for safe, socially distanced data collection. In particular, advances in video conferen...
The majority of research on infants’ and children’s understanding of emotional expressions has focused on their abilities to use emotional expressions to infer how other people feel. However, an emerging body of work suggests that emotional expressions support rich, powerful inferences not just about emotional states but also about other unobserved...
Verbal communication is an ubiquitous aspect of human interaction occurring in many contexts; however, it is primarily studied in the limited context of two people communicating information. Understanding communication in complex, multi-party interactions is both a scientific challenge for psycholinguistics and an engineering challenge for creating...
Disjunction has played a major role in advancing theories of logic, language, and cognition, featuring as the centerpiece of debates on the origins and development of logical thought. Recent studies have argued that due to non-adult-like pragmatic reasoning, preschool children’s comprehension of linguistic disjunction differs from adults in two way...
By the age of two, children tend to assume that new word categories are based on objects' shape, rather than their color or texture; this assumption is called the shape bias. They are thought to learn this bias by observing that their caregiver's language is biased towards shape based categories. This presents a chicken and egg problem: if the shap...
Before formal education begins, children typically acquire a vocabulary of thousands of words. This learning process requires the use of many different information sources in their social environment, including their current state of knowledge and the context in which they hear words used. How is this information integrated? We specify a developmen...
Purpose: Measuring the growth of young children's vocabulary is important for researchers seeking to understand language learning as well as for clinicians aiming to identify early deficits. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) are parent-report instruments that offer a reliable and valid method for measuring early produc...
Evaluating others’ actions as praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental aspect of human nature. A seminal study published in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life, considerably earlier than previously thought (Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007). In this study,...
Curiosity is a fundamental driver of human behavior, and yet because of its open-ended nature and the wide variety of behaviors it inspires in different contexts, it is remarkably difficult to study in a laboratory context. A promising approach to developing and testing theories of curiosity is to instantiate them in artificial agents that are able...
How do postural developments affect infants’ access to social information? We recorded egocentric and third-person video while infants and their caregivers (N=36, 8–16-month-olds, N=19 females) participated in naturalistic play sessions. We then validated the use of a neural network pose detection model to detect faces and hands in the infant view....
Curiosity drives much of human behavior, but its open-ended nature makes it hard to study in the laboratory. Moreover, computational theories of curiosity – models of how intrinsic motivation promotes complex behaviors – have been challenging to test because of technical limits. To circumvent this problem, we develop a new way to assess intrinsic m...
The National Children's Study Cognitive Health Domain Team developed detailed plans for assessing cognition longitudinally from infancy to early adulthood. These plans identify high-priority aspects of cognition that can be measured efficiently and effectively, and we believe they can serve as a model for future large-scale longitudinal research. F...
What do infants and young children tend to see in their everyday lives? Relatively little work has examined the categories and objects that tend to be in the infant view during everyday experience, despite the fact that this knowledge is central to theories of category learning. Here, we analyzed the prevalence of the categories (e.g., people, anim...
Background: Developmental psychologists often make statements of the form “babies learn to do X at age Y”. Yet summaries made on the basis of one or a few studies can misrepresent a messy and complex evidence base. True results may also not be generalizable outside of the specific testing context for theoretically important reasons including the la...
The ability to rapidly recognize words and link them to referents in context is central to children's early language development. This ability, often called word recognition in the developmental literature, is typically studied in the looking-while-listening paradigm, which measures infants' fixation on a target object (vs. a distractor) after hear...
One problem language learners face is extracting word meanings from scenes with many possible referents. Despite the ambiguity of individual situations, a large body of empirical work shows that people are able to learn cross-situationally when a word occurs in different situations. Many computational models of cross-situational word learning have...
Languages are powerful solutions to coordination problems: they provide stable, shared expectations about how the words we say correspond to the beliefs and intentions in our heads. Yet language use in a variable and non-stationary social environment requires linguistic representations to be flexible: old words acquire new ad hoc or partner-specifi...
To what extent do visual concepts of dogs, cars, and clocks change across childhood? We hypothesized that as children progressively learn which features best distinguish visual concepts from one another, they also improve their ability to connect this knowledge with external representations. To examine this possibility, we investigated developmenta...
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...
Young children typically begin learning words during their first two years of life. On the other hand, they also vary substantially in their language learning. Similarities and differences in language learning call for a quantitative theory that can predict and explain which aspects of early language are consistent and which are variable. However,...
A "standard model" is a theoretical framework that synthesizes observables into a quantitative consensus. Have we made progress towards this kind of synthesis for children’s early language learning? Many computational models of early vocabulary learning assume that individual words are learned through an accumulation of environmental input. This as...
A data-driven exploration of children's early language learning across different languages, providing an empirical reference and a new theoretical framework.
This book examines variability and consistency in children's language learning across different languages and cultures, drawing on Wordbank, an open database with data from more than 75,000 ch...
The present study reports a large, cross-sectional study of Mandarin-speaking children’s ability to compute quantity implicatures. To chart the developmental trajectory of this pragmatic ability, we tested 225 Mandarin-speaking children aged 4–8 years on their interpretations of scalar and non-scalar implicatures, as well as numerals. Scalar implic...
We introduce a new resource: the SAYCam corpus. Infants aged 6–32 months wore a head-mounted camera for approximately 2 hr per week, over the course of approximately two-and-a-half years. The result is a large, naturalistic, longitudinal dataset of infant- and child-perspective videos. Over 200,000 words of naturalistic speech have already been tra...
The COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting closure of daycare centers worldwide, led to unprecedented changes in children’s learning environments. This period of increased time at home with caregivers, with limited access to external sources (e.g., daycares) provides a unique opportunity to examine the associations between the caregiver-child activit...
Do children and adults engage in spontaneous Theory of Mind (ToM)? Accumulating evidence from anticipatory looking (AL) studies suggests that they do. But a growing body of studies failed to replicate these original findings. This paper presents the first step of a large-scale multi-lab collaboration dedicated to testing the robustness of spontaneo...
Relational reasoning requires the reasoner to go beyond her/his specific experience, abstracting from items to make inferences about categories and kinds on the basis of structural or analogical similarities. Reasoning about the relations same and different is one of the best-studied cases of relational reasoning, both across species and over human...
Understanding the mechanisms that drive variation in children’s language acquisition requires large, population-representative datasets of children’s word learning across development. Parent report measures such as the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) are commonly used to collect such data, but the traditional paper-based...
Developmental psychologists often make statements of the form “babies do X at age Y”. Such summaries can misrepresent a messy and complex evidence base, yet meta-analyses are under-used in the field.
To facilitate developmental researchers’ access to current meta-analyses, we created MetaLab (metalab.stanford.edu), a platform for open, dynamic met...
