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When participants were asked to count the mugs, adults basically never did, regardless of speaker goals, children continued to do so at elevated rates.

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Providing intentional cues about speaker goals helped adults & kids, but only very slightly. For example, children heard a sentence like "Hey Penguin! Can you get some mugs?" and in one condition heard the goal "We want to drink some tea!" (following the methods of S&A).

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Adults were substantially more likely to use words like "piece" and "part" - children almost never did - and in both groups this tendency was significantly greater when complementary parts were present.

In a follow-up we showed kids & adults images like these & simply asked them to label what they saw.

However, as soon as these same partial objects are accompanied by complementary parts, adults no longer count partial objects as "one" each, presumably because they now encode them as "pieces of forks" rather than as forks. They either exclude both complementary parts, or "count-combine".

Our study, and work by Syrett & Aravind finds that the adult semantics allows partial objects to be named & counted - and most count "four forks" in images like this.

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David Barner @drbarner.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

A new paper, to appear in Dev Psych. Why do kids as old as 5 or 6 count parts of things as though they were whole objects? We argue that this is pragmatic failure due to kids' inability to access alternative descriptions like "piece of fork". osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Age is highly predictive of many important traits, & yet we know very little about when such knowledge emerges & how's it's acquired. Here @kostaboskovic.bsky.social begins this exploration, & finds that preschoolers make physical, social, & psychological traits from perceived age.

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David Barner @drbarner.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

Kimchi fried rice Banh mi with TWO free desserts (cho pudding and tapioca).

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David Barner @drbarner.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

New restaurant post & this time a dilemma. I was planning to go to my all time favorite Burmese restaurant in Irvine this afternoon. Too dangerous? Before you give advice, their paratha is a 10/10.

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kimchi fried rice sandwiches, mustard greens friend rice sandwiches, & pad thai sandwiches. Each of these types includes dozens of variations, totaling 673 in total, of which I have had 1, about 20 times because it is so delicious, and I can't risk anything less.

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There are many things to say about this restaurant, not the least of which is that they have a 75 page menu, which, if you think about it, would take a strong reader an afternoon to read if it were a novella. This restaurant HATES compositionality & so they list all 1860 choices.

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This sandwich is served at the profoundly weird and charming Thanh Tinh Chay restaurant, in one of the poorest neighborhoods of San Diego, in a relentlessly green setting. www.thanhtinhchayrestaurant.com

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David Barner @drbarner.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

A reflection on what I think may be the most expensive banh mi in the world (at around $35 USD with tax & tip), & maybe the best, but almost certainly the best vegan & gf version anywhere, that I didn't know was gf until after 5-6 when they insisted against my objections (pictured: $100 of banh mi).

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Nobody who particularly deserves their particular hell of an inbox (outside this obvious gaff). Here's where we're at right now (x10 or so)

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David Barner @drbarner.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

First, I loved Mike’s link to Quine’s topiary. Quine is often misunderstood (by word learning researchers) as arguing that word learning is hard because reference is ambiguous. The problem for Quine is quite a bit different though.

David Barner @drbarner.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

I found this discussion thought provoking, as somebody who is not quite so boosterish as @mcxfrank.bsky.social & @glupyan.bsky.social, though also an advocate of IRS accounts of meaning (& therefore excited about implications for that view). Two ideas in particular stuck out to me as interesting.

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David Barner @drbarner.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

Age is an important predictor of many behaviors & yet we know little about how children understand it. Early studies suggest they don't know much & conflate age with physical size. Here, @kostaboskovic.bsky.social revisits this consensus & shows even 3-yr-olds use multiple cues to reason about age.

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David Barner @drbarner.bsky.social · 02/08/2025

Susan Carey mic-drop at #cogsci2025. "There are no innate concepts: Discuss"

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David Barner @drbarner.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

We found three main results: (1) that the size of a base had little effect on learning, (2) that learners struggled to acquire multiplicative rules while learning additive rules more easily, (3) learning numbers in a count routine improved memory for words, but impaired map them to meanings.