Diane Poulin-Dubois
Biographic Data
| ID | 3774027 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Diane Poulin-Dubois |
| GIVEN NAMES | Diane |
| FAMILY NAME | Poulin-Dubois |
| SIGNATURE | POULIN-DUBOIS D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Concordia University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 43 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Does pointing predict bilingual children’s vocabulary
Previous studies have shown that children’s and parents’ pointing predicts monolingual children’s vocabulary, both concurrently and longitudinally. In this study, we predicted that children’s and parents’ pointing would positively predict bilingual children’s vocabulary growth in both languages. However, the strength of that link could differ depending on the child’s dominance, as parents often play a more didactic role when interacting in childr…
Touching while listening: Does infants’ haptic word processing speed predict vocabulary development
The present study examined the links between haptic word processing speed, vocabulary, and inhibitory control among bilingual children. Three main hypotheses were tested: faster haptic processing speed, measured by the Computerized Comprehension Task at age 1;11, would be associated with larger concurrent vocabulary and greater longitudinal vocabulary growth. Second, early vocabulary size would be associated with greater vocabulary growth at 3;0 …
Preschoolers’ anthropomorphizing of robots: Do human-like properties matter
Prior work has yielded contradicting evidence regarding the age at which children consistently and correctly categorize things as living or non-living. The present study tested children's animacy judgments about robots with a Naïve Biology task. In the Naïve Biology task, 3- and 5-year-olds were asked if robots, animals, or artifacts possessed mechanical or biological internal parts. To gauge how much children anthropomorphize robots in compariso…
Effect of bilingualism on infants’ cognitive flexibility
Research suggests that bilinguals often outperform monolinguals on tasks that tap into executive functions, such as those requiring conflict resolution and cognitive flexibility. Recently, better attentional control has been detected in infants as young as 6 months, thereby providing a possible basis for a cognitive benefit before language production. The goal of the present study was to examine if cognitive flexibility is more advanced in biling…
Testing the Bilingual Cognitive Advantage in Toddlers Using the Early Executive Functions Questionnaire
The present study aims to assess differences in executive functioning between monolingual and multilingual 23-month-old toddlers, both when dichotomizing multilingualism and assessing it on a continuum. It is hypothesized that multilinguals, individuals with greater non-dominant language exposure, and individuals with more translation equivalents, would perform better in the following domains: response inhibition, attentional flexibility, and reg…
Relations between phonological production, grammar and the lexicon in bilingual French-English children
AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: This study examines multiple associations between language domains in bilingual children with a focus on phonology. Previous studies indicate within- but not cross-language associations between vocabulary and grammar in bilingual children. We investigate whether the relation between phonology and other language domains differs from the one reported between vocabulary and grammar. METHODOLOGY: = 31), aged 31 months, participat…
Selective attention to the mouth of talking faces in monolinguals and bilinguals aged 5 months to 5 years
A talking face provides redundant cues on the mouth that might support language learning and highly salient social cues in the eyes. What drives children's looking toward the mouth versus eyes of a talking face? This study reports data from 292 children who viewed faces speaking English, French, and Russian. We investigated the impact of children's age (5 months to 5 years) and language background (monolingual English, monolingual French, bilingu…
Language status at age 3: Group and individual prediction from vocabulary comprehension in the second year
The present research extends recent work on the prediction of preschool language skills by exploring prediction from decontextualized vocabulary comprehension. Vocabulary comprehension was a stronger predictor than parent-reported production, yielding a quadrupling of variance accounted for relative to prior studies. Parallel studies (Studies 1 and 2) are reported for two linguistically and geographically distinct samples. In both samples, decont…
A cross-language study of decontextualized vocabulary comprehension in toddlerhood and kindergarten readiness
[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 54(7) of Developmental Psychology (see record 2018-30226-001). In the article, the reference for Legacy, Zesiger, Friend, & Poulin-Dubois (2016) should be Legacy, Zesiger, Friend, & Poulin-Dubois (2018). The correct reference for the article is listed below: Legacy, J., Zesiger, P., Friend, M., & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2018). Vocabulary size and speed of word recognition in very youn…
Goal Detection
Dog or chien ? Translation equivalents in the receptive and expressive vocabularies of young French–English bilinguals
In order to address gaps in the literature surrounding the acquisition of translation equivalents (TEs) in young bilinguals, two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, TEs were measured in the expressive vocabularies of thirty-four French–English bilinguals at 1;4, 1;10, and 2;6 using the MacArthur Bates CDI. Children's acquisition of TEs occurred gradually, with more balanced ratios of exposure and vocabulary associated with larger proport…
Vocabulary size, translation equivalents, and efficiency in word recognition in very young bilinguals
The present study examined early vocabulary development in fifty-nine French monolingual and fifty French–English bilingual infants (1;4–1;6). Vocabulary comprehension was assessed using both parental report (MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory; CDI) and the Computerized Comprehension Task (CCT). When assessing receptive vocabulary development using parental report, the bilinguals knew more words in their L1 versus their L2. Howev…
Lexical processing and organization in bilingual first language acquisition: Guiding future research
A rich body of work in adult bilinguals documents an interconnected lexical network across languages, such that early word retrieval is language independent. This literature has yielded a number of influential models of bilingual semantic memory. However, extant models provide limited predictions about the emergence of lexical organization in bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA). Empirical evidence from monolingual infants suggests that le…
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 mon…
Early verb learning in 20-month-old Japanese-speaking children
The present study investigated whether children's representations of morphosyntactic information are abstract enough to guide early verb learning. Using an infant-controlled habituation paradigm with a switch design, Japanese-speaking children aged 1 ; 8 were habituated to two different events in which an object was engaging in an action. Each event was paired with a novel word embedded in a single intransitive verb sentence frame. The results in…
A Cross-Linguistic Study of Word-Mapping in 18- to 20-Month-Old Infants: Cross-Linguistic Study of Rapid Word-Mapping
This study was designed to examine whether infants acquiring languages that place a differential emphasis on nouns and verbs, focus their attention on motions or objects in the presence of a novel word. An infant-controlled habituation paradigm was used to teach 18- to 20-month-old English-, French-, and Japanese-speaking infants' novel words for events. Infants were habituated to two word-event pairings and then presented with new combinations t…
Piaget on Abstraction
This paper is a review and discussion of Piaget’s recent work on abstraction. Piaget distinguishes between empirical abstraction which concerns qualities found in reality and reflecting abstraction which deals with coordinations of actions and constructs. In development, reflecting abstraction functions more and more independently from empirical abstraction, which, in turn, is increasingly dependent on reflecting abstraction. The authors argue th…
The effect of a looker’s past reliability on infants’ reasoning about beliefs
We investigated whether 16-month-old infants' past experience with a person's gaze reliability influences their expectation about the person's ability to form beliefs. Infants were first administered a search task in which they observed an experimenter show excitement while looking inside a box that either contained a toy (reliable looker condition) or was empty (unreliable looker condition). The infants were then administered a true belief task …
Young monolingual and bilingual children's responses to violation of the Mutual Exclusivity Principle
The mutual exclusivity principle, which states that an object category can have only one name, has been shown to be used by toddlers and preschoolaged children(Markman, 1991). Studies of the mutual exclusivity principle in bilingual children aged over 3.5 years have generally found a tendency to honor the principle within languages, but not across languages. To date, younger bilinguals'adherence to this principle has not been investigated. In the…
Toddlers' attention to intentions-in-action in learning novel action words
Toddlers' ability to use cues such as eye gaze and gestures to infer the meaning of novel action words was examined. In Experiment 1, 21- and 27-month-olds were taught labels for pairs of videotaped actions that were either similar or dissimilar in appearance. Similar actions differed mainly in the presence of behavioral cues related to the agents' intentions (e.g., extended arms). Only the older children were able to learn the labels for the sim…
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…
Developmental origin of the animate-inanimate distinction
The authors examine recent theoretical perspectives of the development of the animate-inanimate distinction in infancy. From these theoretical views emerge 7 characteristic properties, each related to physical or psychological causality, that distinguish animates from inanimates. The literature is reviewed for evidence of infants' ability to perceive and understand each of these properties. Infants associate some animate properties with people by…
Infants' reliance on shape to generalize novel labels to animate and inanimate objects
Two experiments were conducted to examine infants' reliance on object shape versus colour for word generalization to animate and inanimate objects. A total of seventy-three infants aged 1;4 to 1;10 were taught labels for either novel vehicles or novel animals using a preferential looking procedure (Experiment 1) or an interactive procedure (Experiment 2). The results of both experiments indicated that infants limited their word generalization to …
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…
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 loo…
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 p…
Developmental origin of the animate-inanimate distinction
The authors examine recent theoretical perspectives of the development of the animate-inanimate distinction in infancy. From these theoretical views emerge 7 characteristic properties, each related to physical or psychological causality, that distinguish animates from inanimates. The literature is reviewed for evidence of infants' ability to perceive and understand each of these properties. Infants associate some animate properties with people by…
A cross-language study of decontextualized vocabulary comprehension in toddlerhood and kindergarten readiness
[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 54(7) of Developmental Psychology (see record 2018-30226-001). In the article, the reference for Legacy, Zesiger, Friend, & Poulin-Dubois (2016) should be Legacy, Zesiger, Friend, & Poulin-Dubois (2018). The correct reference for the article is listed below: Legacy, J., Zesiger, P., Friend, M., & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2018). Vocabulary size and speed of word recognition in very youn…
Toddlers' attention to intentions-in-action in learning novel action words
Toddlers' ability to use cues such as eye gaze and gestures to infer the meaning of novel action words was examined. In Experiment 1, 21- and 27-month-olds were taught labels for pairs of videotaped actions that were either similar or dissimilar in appearance. Similar actions differed mainly in the presence of behavioral cues related to the agents' intentions (e.g., extended arms). Only the older children were able to learn the labels for the sim…
Lexical processing and organization in bilingual first language acquisition: Guiding future research
A rich body of work in adult bilinguals documents an interconnected lexical network across languages, such that early word retrieval is language independent. This literature has yielded a number of influential models of bilingual semantic memory. However, extant models provide limited predictions about the emergence of lexical organization in bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA). Empirical evidence from monolingual infants suggests that le…
The effect of a looker’s past reliability on infants’ reasoning about beliefs
We investigated whether 16-month-old infants' past experience with a person's gaze reliability influences their expectation about the person's ability to form beliefs. Infants were first administered a search task in which they observed an experimenter show excitement while looking inside a box that either contained a toy (reliable looker condition) or was empty (unreliable looker condition). The infants were then administered a true belief task …
Preschoolers’ anthropomorphizing of robots: Do human-like properties matter
Prior work has yielded contradicting evidence regarding the age at which children consistently and correctly categorize things as living or non-living. The present study tested children's animacy judgments about robots with a Naïve Biology task. In the Naïve Biology task, 3- and 5-year-olds were asked if robots, animals, or artifacts possessed mechanical or biological internal parts. To gauge how much children anthropomorphize robots in compariso…
Selective attention to the mouth of talking faces in monolinguals and bilinguals aged 5 months to 5 years
A talking face provides redundant cues on the mouth that might support language learning and highly salient social cues in the eyes. What drives children's looking toward the mouth versus eyes of a talking face? This study reports data from 292 children who viewed faces speaking English, French, and Russian. We investigated the impact of children's age (5 months to 5 years) and language background (monolingual English, monolingual French, bilingu…
Testing the Bilingual Cognitive Advantage in Toddlers Using the Early Executive Functions Questionnaire
The present study aims to assess differences in executive functioning between monolingual and multilingual 23-month-old toddlers, both when dichotomizing multilingualism and assessing it on a continuum. It is hypothesized that multilinguals, individuals with greater non-dominant language exposure, and individuals with more translation equivalents, would perform better in the following domains: response inhibition, attentional flexibility, and reg…
Language status at age 3: Group and individual prediction from vocabulary comprehension in the second year
The present research extends recent work on the prediction of preschool language skills by exploring prediction from decontextualized vocabulary comprehension. Vocabulary comprehension was a stronger predictor than parent-reported production, yielding a quadrupling of variance accounted for relative to prior studies. Parallel studies (Studies 1 and 2) are reported for two linguistically and geographically distinct samples. In both samples, decont…
Psychology of Computer Use: X. Effect of Learning Logo on Children's Problem-Solving Skills
A natural experiment was used to determine whether learning the computer language Logo improves children's problem-solving strategies outside of the Logo context. 8-yr.-olds who learned Logo in school were found to use both debugging techniques and procedurality in their computer programming. They and a group of control children of the same age were pre- and posttested on a game requiring debugging skills (Mastermind) and another game requiring p…
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 p…
Early lexical development: The contribution of parental labelling and infants' categorization abilities
In the present longitudinal study, we examined changes in parental labelling and infants' categorization skills as potential predictors of vocabulary composition, the age of the naming explosion, and the acquisition of subordinate labels. Sixteen French- and English-speaking parent–child dyads were videotaped during a 2O-minute free-play session every month beginning when the child was 1;0 and ending at 2;0. The children received object-manipulat…
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 rate…
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 loo…
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…
Infants' reliance on shape to generalize novel labels to animate and inanimate objects
Two experiments were conducted to examine infants' reliance on object shape versus colour for word generalization to animate and inanimate objects. A total of seventy-three infants aged 1;4 to 1;10 were taught labels for either novel vehicles or novel animals using a preferential looking procedure (Experiment 1) or an interactive procedure (Experiment 2). The results of both experiments indicated that infants limited their word generalization to …
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…
Developmental origin of the animate-inanimate distinction
The authors examine recent theoretical perspectives of the development of the animate-inanimate distinction in infancy. From these theoretical views emerge 7 characteristic properties, each related to physical or psychological causality, that distinguish animates from inanimates. The literature is reviewed for evidence of infants' ability to perceive and understand each of these properties. Infants associate some animate properties with people by…
Young monolingual and bilingual children's responses to violation of the Mutual Exclusivity Principle
The mutual exclusivity principle, which states that an object category can have only one name, has been shown to be used by toddlers and preschoolaged children(Markman, 1991). Studies of the mutual exclusivity principle in bilingual children aged over 3.5 years have generally found a tendency to honor the principle within languages, but not across languages. To date, younger bilinguals'adherence to this principle has not been investigated. In the…
Toddlers' attention to intentions-in-action in learning novel action words
Toddlers' ability to use cues such as eye gaze and gestures to infer the meaning of novel action words was examined. In Experiment 1, 21- and 27-month-olds were taught labels for pairs of videotaped actions that were either similar or dissimilar in appearance. Similar actions differed mainly in the presence of behavioral cues related to the agents' intentions (e.g., extended arms). Only the older children were able to learn the labels for the sim…
Piaget on Abstraction
This paper is a review and discussion of Piaget’s recent work on abstraction. Piaget distinguishes between empirical abstraction which concerns qualities found in reality and reflecting abstraction which deals with coordinations of actions and constructs. In development, reflecting abstraction functions more and more independently from empirical abstraction, which, in turn, is increasingly dependent on reflecting abstraction. The authors argue th…
The effect of a looker’s past reliability on infants’ reasoning about beliefs
We investigated whether 16-month-old infants' past experience with a person's gaze reliability influences their expectation about the person's ability to form beliefs. Infants were first administered a search task in which they observed an experimenter show excitement while looking inside a box that either contained a toy (reliable looker condition) or was empty (unreliable looker condition). The infants were then administered a true belief task …
Early verb learning in 20-month-old Japanese-speaking children
The present study investigated whether children's representations of morphosyntactic information are abstract enough to guide early verb learning. Using an infant-controlled habituation paradigm with a switch design, Japanese-speaking children aged 1 ; 8 were habituated to two different events in which an object was engaging in an action. Each event was paired with a novel word embedded in a single intransitive verb sentence frame. The results in…
A Cross-Linguistic Study of Word-Mapping in 18- to 20-Month-Old Infants: Cross-Linguistic Study of Rapid Word-Mapping
This study was designed to examine whether infants acquiring languages that place a differential emphasis on nouns and verbs, focus their attention on motions or objects in the presence of a novel word. An infant-controlled habituation paradigm was used to teach 18- to 20-month-old English-, French-, and Japanese-speaking infants' novel words for events. Infants were habituated to two word-event pairings and then presented with new combinations t…
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 mon…
Vocabulary size, translation equivalents, and efficiency in word recognition in very young bilinguals
The present study examined early vocabulary development in fifty-nine French monolingual and fifty French–English bilingual infants (1;4–1;6). Vocabulary comprehension was assessed using both parental report (MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory; CDI) and the Computerized Comprehension Task (CCT). When assessing receptive vocabulary development using parental report, the bilinguals knew more words in their L1 versus their L2. Howev…
Lexical processing and organization in bilingual first language acquisition: Guiding future research
A rich body of work in adult bilinguals documents an interconnected lexical network across languages, such that early word retrieval is language independent. This literature has yielded a number of influential models of bilingual semantic memory. However, extant models provide limited predictions about the emergence of lexical organization in bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA). Empirical evidence from monolingual infants suggests that le…
Goal Detection
Dog or chien ? Translation equivalents in the receptive and expressive vocabularies of young French–English bilinguals
In order to address gaps in the literature surrounding the acquisition of translation equivalents (TEs) in young bilinguals, two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, TEs were measured in the expressive vocabularies of thirty-four French–English bilinguals at 1;4, 1;10, and 2;6 using the MacArthur Bates CDI. Children's acquisition of TEs occurred gradually, with more balanced ratios of exposure and vocabulary associated with larger proport…
A cross-language study of decontextualized vocabulary comprehension in toddlerhood and kindergarten readiness
[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 54(7) of Developmental Psychology (see record 2018-30226-001). In the article, the reference for Legacy, Zesiger, Friend, & Poulin-Dubois (2016) should be Legacy, Zesiger, Friend, & Poulin-Dubois (2018). The correct reference for the article is listed below: Legacy, J., Zesiger, P., Friend, M., & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2018). Vocabulary size and speed of word recognition in very youn…
Selective attention to the mouth of talking faces in monolinguals and bilinguals aged 5 months to 5 years
A talking face provides redundant cues on the mouth that might support language learning and highly salient social cues in the eyes. What drives children's looking toward the mouth versus eyes of a talking face? This study reports data from 292 children who viewed faces speaking English, French, and Russian. We investigated the impact of children's age (5 months to 5 years) and language background (monolingual English, monolingual French, bilingu…
Language status at age 3: Group and individual prediction from vocabulary comprehension in the second year
The present research extends recent work on the prediction of preschool language skills by exploring prediction from decontextualized vocabulary comprehension. Vocabulary comprehension was a stronger predictor than parent-reported production, yielding a quadrupling of variance accounted for relative to prior studies. Parallel studies (Studies 1 and 2) are reported for two linguistically and geographically distinct samples. In both samples, decont…
Relations between phonological production, grammar and the lexicon in bilingual French-English children
AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: This study examines multiple associations between language domains in bilingual children with a focus on phonology. Previous studies indicate within- but not cross-language associations between vocabulary and grammar in bilingual children. We investigate whether the relation between phonology and other language domains differs from the one reported between vocabulary and grammar. METHODOLOGY: = 31), aged 31 months, participat…
Effect of bilingualism on infants’ cognitive flexibility
Research suggests that bilinguals often outperform monolinguals on tasks that tap into executive functions, such as those requiring conflict resolution and cognitive flexibility. Recently, better attentional control has been detected in infants as young as 6 months, thereby providing a possible basis for a cognitive benefit before language production. The goal of the present study was to examine if cognitive flexibility is more advanced in biling…
Psychology (28 works) · Linguistics (18 works) · Cognitive psychology (17 works) · Language Development and Disorders (17 works) · Developmental psychology (15 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (13 works) · Vocabulary (13 works) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism (11 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (11 works)