On babies' abilities: "There is also evidence [that children may have] inaccurate conceptions of babies’ abilities. In one survey of beliefs about abilities at different ages, for example, 31% of 4-year-olds judged that babies could talk (Dowker, Hart, Heal, Phillips, & Wilson, 1994)." - Miller, Hardin & Montgomery (2003)
On magical metaphors: "Specifically, for the metaphorical statement “The prison guard was a hard rock”, 6- and 7-year-olds [often gave] literal interpretations that involved magic (“The king had a magic rock and he turned the guard into another rock”)..." - Grigoroglou & Papafragou (2017), Acquisition of Pragmatics
On children's use of the word "know": "(e.g. The adult takes the child to the bathroom when she gets up in the morning. Child: ‘I haven’t peed on Grandma’s bed. You know that?’)." - Harris, Yang & Cui (2017)
One little rebel: "When looking only at the first trial, 79% (11 ⁄ 14) of the pointing infants pointed on that trial. The first point in the first trial was equally often directed toward the target container (5 ⁄ 10) or the distractor container (5 ⁄ 10), Binominal test, p = 1, and one infant pointed with both arms to both containers at the same time." - Knudsen & Liszkowski (2012)
On teeth: "[Children] were confident that the tooth fairy exists "because who takes all your teeth if there's no tooth fairy?"" - Paul Harris, Trusting What You're Told
A dignified excerpt from a corpus analysis of children's mental-state language: Father: "I think it's coal" Child: "No, it's poop!" - Sabbagh & Callanan, 1998
On the joys and challenges of developmental research: "Pilot testing...demonstrated that younger children have trouble with the paper task, and that many simply began drawing pictures on the stimulus sheets." - Duffy, Toriyama, Itakura & Kitayama, 2008
Shots fired: "One knows some things by virtue of being a sentient human being (e.g., the difference between pleasure and pain), others because of living in New England (e.g., the difference between New England—real—clam chowder and the Manhattan variety)..." - Nickerson, 1999
#restingneutralface: "In piloting, we have found that actresses who maintain an entirely neutral expression throughout the gaze sequences are judged as “grim”, “scary”, and not socially engaging." - Wang & Hamilton, 2014
On Bayesian data analysis: "Here is a list of things that have been identified as cancer risks: electric razors; broken arms (but only in women); fluorescent lights; allergies; breeding reindeer; being a waiter; owning a pet bird; being short; being tall; and hot dogs. And, in case anyone is feeling safe - having a refrigerator. We are apparently all at risk. These results were not produced by Bayesian methods." - Steven N. Goodman, Clinical Trials Presentation, 2005
#science "In a pretest, we confirmed that chocolates were more desirable than feces." - Balcetis & Dunning, 2010
Best pop culture reference in an academic paper goes to: "Taken together, these results suggest that during the preschool years, children transition from being “Socially Malleable Threes” to “Forget You Fours” (see Cee-Lo Green, 2010). What developments foster this shift to greater non-conformist thinking and resistance to social pressure, at least in context of the artifact function domain?" - Seston & Kelemen, 2013