Geänderte Inhalte

Research on whether asexual individuals desire (romantic) relationships, and if so, how they picture their ideal relationship has been growing in the past years. However, less is known about the preferred attributes of an ideal partner in such relationships and whether these partner(ship) preferences are different from what heterosexual individuals want. The goal of the present study was to compare the types of preferred relationships and the ideal characteristics of a long-term partner of self-identified asexual and heterosexual women. Additionally, we examined differences in characteristics of asexual and heterosexual women using self-evaluations of the same attributes used for the partner preference ratings. We used data from the Ideal Partner Survey, a large-scale, multinational online study. Of 51,775 participants, 51,328 identified as heterosexual (Mage = 25.13) and 447 identified as asexual (Mage = 24.03). To create comparable samples for analyses, each asexual person was matched with a heterosexual person using propensity score matching (relationship options sample = 646, partner preference sample = 780, self-rating sample = 772). Compared to heterosexual women, asexual women were less interested in purely sexual relationships, and more interested in emotionally romantic and alternative types of committed relationships as well as not being in any relationship (“single”). Asexual women placed less importance on all partner preference attributes, except educated and intelligent. They also consistently rated themselves lower on all attributes than heterosexual women. These findings suggest distinct differences between asexual and heterosexual women in their relationship interests, partner preferences, and self-perceived characteristics.

Research showcases children’s active role in steering their learning progress by choosing what, when and whom to learn from. Here, we examined differences in children’s preferred way to sample their environment and the extent to which children’s sampling preferences predict learning outcomes. During training, 3- and 6-year-olds chose whether they wanted to actively sample objects (whose labels they would be presented with) or passively view a set of object-label associations. Following this choice, they were then presented with novel object-label associations in the chosen manner. We found that when given the choice to learn in their preferred manner, children who had a reduced preference for active sampling learned better in the passive condition. This effect was more pronounced in younger children. Our findings highlight the dynamics of children’s active learning, with children’s learning outcomes being influenced by how they choose to sample their environment. Children are not just active in terms of choosing what to learn but also accurately estimate how they ought to sample their environment.

There is an established body of research showing that both the quality and quantity of caregiver input plays an integral role in infants’ language development. Equally, infants play an active role in eliciting that input, with their interests also guiding what they learn. In this study, we examined monolingual German children to see whether caregivers’ perception of their child’s interest predicts the quality of caregiver speech as well as infant vocalisations during a shared book-reading interaction at two timepoints, 18 months and 24 months. We also aimed to examine longitudinal changes in prosodic qualities of infant-directed speech over infant development. Caregivers read two books to their child, one of which they rated to be of high interest to their child, while the other was rated to be of low interest to the child. We measured the pitch range, mean pitch and duration of caregiver utterances as well as the number of infant vocalisations during the book reading sessions. We found that the duration of utterance varied significantly, with caregivers producing shorter utterances when reading high interest books to their child at 18 months and producing longer utterances reading high interest books to their older, 24-month-old infant. Infants also vocalised more during high interest books, which we interpret in terms of their active elicitation of information during reading. Longitudinally, we observed that pitch range increased and mean pitch decreased (approaching adultdirected speech), aligning with previous research on infantdirected speech. These findings help underscore the dynamic feedback loops of caregiver-child interactions which play a pivotal role in early development, with children seeking information and caregivers responding contingently.

There is a long-standing debate on the extent to which early word learning is shaped by the child’s existing lexical knowledge relative to the child’s environment. We investigated the influence of the connectivity of words in the child’s lexicon (preferential attachment), the child’s environment (preferential acquisition), or between novel and known words (lure of associates) in the development of early phonological and semantic networks, using longitudinal data from 17-to-36-monthold Norwegian children. We compared the extent to which the different scenarios predicted individual children’s lexical acquisition whilst also examining the joint influence of form and meaning on vocabulary growth. Our results revealed a ‘rich-get-richer’ pattern whereby semantically well-connected words in children’s existing lexicons best predicted the likelihood of a word entering the lexicon earlier. Phonological connectivity tended to impede word learning, with leveraging effects only in early development when semantic connectivity was low. Our findings imply that words are learned more easily when they are similar to many words in meaning, but not, necessarily, in form. Furthermore, relative to previous studies examining the influence of phonological connectivity on word learning, our study highlights the importance of considering the interplay between semantics and phonology and accounting for individual differences in vocabulary development.