Brian P. Ackerman

TL;DR: One of the core goals of the research program has been to construct robust representations of environmental adversity for disadvantaged families, and it is found that family instability and change in environmental circumstances predict increases in problem behaviors, and that dose of adversity seems to matter for some variables if it is recent, and not for other variables.

TL;DR: The authors explored young children's ability to discriminate among utterances that violated or conformed to conversational rules and their ability to explain rule violations, and found that only the third graders consistently generated correct explanations.

TL;DR: This article found that children make source errors in attributing causal inferences to stories rather than to themselves, and that the source errors vary with the likelihood that a story representation in memory contains causal information that matches retrieval cue information.

TL;DR: This article found that the assumption of speaker credibility affects children's judgments of the external consistency of statements, and that the speaker was either an adult or a child, thus the contextual source was either more or less reliable than the speaker.

TL;DR: In this paper, a study was conducted to determine if 7 and 10-year-old children and adults are sensitive to their own and another listener's failure to understand literal and non-literal (i.e., sarcastic) uses of utterances.