Barbara Landau - US grants

DESCRIPTION (Applicant's Abstract): In their first several years of language learning, children acquire roughly 15,000 words. Understanding how they learn so many words so quickly is fundamental to understanding a critical aspect of human cognition: How natural predispositions interact with learning to carve the world into the categories encoded by language. Answering this question is, in turn, a prerequisite for understanding disorders in language learning and the often observed links between language disorders and other learning disabilities. In this research, the investigators will examine a "shape bias" in young children's and adults' word learning. As first reported by Landau, Smith, & Jones (1988), 2- and 3-year-olds and adults who are shown a novel object and hear it named later extend the name to other objects that are the same shape as the exemplar, regardless of variations in texture or size. The purpose of the proposed research is to move the study of naming and its special relation to shape in a new direction. Current research in adults' perception of shape suggests that static properties of shape may interact with substance and motion to inform observers about rigidity, which then may guide attention towards or away from shape. Furthermore, natural versus man-made textures may inform observers about an object's category, and hence which kinds of properties may be most important for membership. The investigators ask how specific aspects of shape and their interaction with material and texture influence categorization and naming by children and adults. The present research consists of ten experiments designed to examine three issues: 1) How different properties of static shape and their interactions with material guide children's and adults' generalization of a new word to new exemplars. 2) How differences between natural and man-made textures might affect naming and categorization, specifically whether objects with these different texture types invite subjects to generalize to different types of objects. 3) How higher-level conceptual knowledge affects subjects' inferences about the range of possible shapes included in a named category. In each experiment, subjects are 2-, 3-, and 5-year-olds and adults. In the basic method, subjects are presented with novel 2- or 3-dimensional objects or materials. In the Word condition, the stimulus is named; in the Similarity condition, it is not named. Then subjects decide whether other objects can be called by the same name, or they decide whether the other objects are "like" the exemplar. These methods duplicate events that naturally occur during language learning.

DESCRIPTION: The objective of the proposed research is to examine the relationship between spatial language and spatial cognition in children with Williams syndrome. Modern theories of cognition and cognitive development assume that human language reflects the organization of human thought. In theories of language learning, it is further assumed that children learn to talk about what they know- the objects and events that they see and hear around them. Recently, these theories have been challenged by evidence from an unusually genetic syndrome in which language and though appear to be partially dissociated. Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) show a characteristic cognitive profile that includes profound deficits in spatial representation together with relatively spared and normally developing language. This combination of deficit in spatial understanding together with apparently spared development of language raises the question how these individuals learn to talk about space, using nouns, verbs, and prepositions to encode the objects,e vents, and spatial relationships they observe around them. Although there is currently considerable research activity on WS, there have been no detailed studies on the character on their spatial language nor how it may be related to deficits in their spatial cognition. The research described in this proposal will begin to delineate the specific nature of the spatial deficit in WS individuals, the specific nature of their spatial language, and the possible relationships between these aspects of language and thought in this syndrome. A series of nine experiments on the spatial deficit will examine the nature of spatial breakdown, especially focusing on (a) the detailed nature of failure in pattern construction tasks, which is a hallmark of the WS cognitive profile; and (b) whether spatial breakdown is global or specific, falling along established lines of cognitive architecture. A series of six experiments on spatial language will examine whether spatial language is preserved in WS, and whether any breakdown parallels the breakdown. in spatial cognition. Overall, the research has two complementary goals: one is to better understand the pattern of cognitive breakdown and preservation in WS; the second is to use these patterns to better understand the nature of cognitive architecture, and in general, the nature of its breakdown in cognitive developmental disorder. Therefore, as its often the case for studies of development in unusual populations, the results will also shed light on the development of language and though in normally developing children.

The goal of this project is to advance our understanding of the relationship between spatial language and spatial cognition, specifically by asking how non-linguistic spatial cognition supports the fundamental human capacity to talk about space. Modern theories of cognition and cognitive development assume that language reflects thought, and that understanding of space is critical in supporting the ability to talk about objects, their spatial relationships, and their motions through space. However, we have only a very limited understanding of how these two cognitive systems interact as knowledge of space is translated into language and vice versa. Our research seeks to delineate more fully the nature of the interactions, by asking what elements of non-linguistic spatial cognition are necessary for the acquisition and use of spatial language, and how changes in spatial cognition affect the ability to talk about space. We examine these interactions by studying the emergence of spatial cognition and spatial language among children and adults with Williams Syndrome (WS), an unusual genetic defect in which spatial cognition appears to be severely impaired but language is generally unimpaired. By understanding how spatial language emerges in the absence of normal non-linguistic spatial cognition, we will be better able to understand the nature of normal human cognitive architecture that permits accurate translation between the two cognitive systems as well as the circumstances under which such translation may be compromised. These issues will be addressed in two sets of experiments that examine the architecture of the spatial cognitive system and the nature of spatial language among WS individuals and normally developing individuals. Studies of spatial cognition include examination of how individuals solve complex spatial construction tasks, how they represent and remember objects and locations, and how they navigate through space to locate objects. Studies of spatial language include examination of how individuals talk about objects (using nouns), motions (using verbs), and paths and locations (using spatial prepositions). Comparison of performance on linguistic and non-linguistic spatial tasks will advance our understanding of how language typically encodes our spatial experience, and the circumstances under which such encoding may break down.

DESCRIPTION: (Adapted From The Applicant's Abstract.) A series of experiments is proposed to investigate the basic speech perception capacities of infants and the role that such capacities play in acquiring a native language. The proposed research has several objectives. The first is to gain a fuller understanding of basic processing resources that infants have for perceiving speech in their natural environments. Accordingly, some of the proposed studies will investigate how memory and attentional demands affect infants' perception of speech sounds. Information from these investigations achieving the remaining objectives which relate to understanding the role of speech perception capacities in acquiring various elements of the structural organization of a native language. One such objective is to determine when infants learn about regularly occurring patterns involving segmental and suprasegmental features of native language utterances. This in turn, bears on another aim of the proposed research, which is to determine whether sensitivity to such regularities provide the language learner with clues about the underlying organization of utterances in the language. In particular, are there cues in speech that aid learners in discovering linguistically relevant units and their relations to each other? A related objective is to delineate the role that speech perception capacities play in learning words. Other related studies will focus on the nature of the information that is stored in words. Several different methods will be used in the proposed studies. Two- month- olds will be tested using versions of the high-amplitude-sucking procedure. Infants, ranging from 4.5 to 11 months of age, will be tested with versions of the Headturn Preference Procedure. Both procedures are versatile enough to be used not only to examine perceptual capacities, but also to investigate memory for speech information. Speech perception is an important aspect of normal human communication. The proposed studies are intended to clarify the role of speech perception in language acquisition. Not only does such information provide background about the normal range of capacities during the first year, but it helps to identify critical processes for the successful development of communication skills. Such information has practical relevance to those involved in the formation of treatment programs for communication disorders.

This research will explore spatial cognition and spatial language in children and adults, using evidence from a rare genetic deficit, Williams syndrome, to shed light on the nature of normal spatial cognition. Individuals with Williams syndrome typically have a cognitive profile of profoundly impaired spatial cognition together with relatively spared language. This syndrome therefore provides a unique opportunity to understand the nature of spatial cognition and spatial language, their development, and their interaction. The goal of this research is to determine (a) whether spatial breakdown is selective, occurring for only certain spatial capacities but not others, and (b) whether spatial language can be acquired and used normally in the absence of interaction with normal spatial cognition. The question of "selectivity" will be addressed by experiments in four spatial domains, object representation, perception of space vs. visual-manual action in space, navigation, and spatial language. If some aspects of spatial cognition are spared, but others are not, this would be consistent with the idea that spatial cognition is specialized, and that different kinds of spatial capacities develop from different origins. In contrast, if all aspects of spatial cognition are impaired, this would be consistent with the idea that there are general principles of development that affect all kinds of spatial cognition equally. The question of "interaction" between spatial language and non-linguistic spatial cognition will be addressed by experiments on the relationship between the two kinds of spatial knowledge. If both are equally impaired, this would suggest a highly interactive organization of the brain in which spatial cognition and spatial language are tightly coupled. In contrast, if spatial language is selectively spared, this would be consistent with a high degree of selectivity, and would mean that language development need not be affected by certain kinds of cognitive impairment. As a whole, these studies should elucidate the nature of normal spatial cognition by determining whether development and its breakdown occur along the lines of normal cognitive architecture, which would suggest cognitive specialization. They should elucidate the nature of spatial language by determining whether it can develop normally in the absence of normal non-linguistic spatial cognition, which would suggest a high degree of independence between the two systems. And they should shed light on developmental processes, by determining whether breakdown in one system inevitably forces changes in other systems, or whether developmental breakdown can apply selectively across sub-systems of cognition.

A series of experiments is proposed to investigate the basic speech perception capacities of infants and the role of these capacities in acquiring a native language. During the course of development, speech-processing capacities become adapted to the specific organization of native language sound patterns to provide fast and efficient recognition of words in fluent speech. Accordingly, one aim of the proposed research is to develop a clearer picture of the speech information that infants encode and remember. A fuller account of infants' memory capacities for speech is required to understand processes underlying word learning and the development of a lexicon. A number of the proposed studies examine the nature and extent of information that infants retain about speech and the implications this has for the growth and organization of a lexicon. The investigator has been exploring infants' use of their growing knowledge of native language sounds patterns to segment words from fluent speech. Thus, a second aim is to identify potential cues to word boundaries used by infants in processing fluent speech and to investigate how and when infants integrate the various cues that are available to them. A clearer picture of the nature of the words that infants detect and encode from fluent speech will be useful in understanding how they begin to discover the syntactic organization of native language utterances. For example, sensitivity to the occurrence of positioning of certain grammatical morphemes in utterances could provide the learner with clues about syntactic organization. Previous research from this laboratory has shown that infants are sensitive to the prosodic marking of utterances. Thus, a third major aim of the proposed research how this sensitivity to prosody might be used with other information in the speech signal, such as the occurrence of grammatical morphemes to aid learners in the discovery of the syntactic organization of their native language.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): We propose a conference designed to further our understanding of how infants and children acquire and learn to use spatial language -- the language we use to talk about objects, events, and spatial relationships in the world. Spatial language and spatial cognition are fundamental to human knowledge, and therefore serve as a key domain within which to ask about how language develops from pre-linguistic foundations, and how it later comes to affect spatial thinking. Specific topics will include (a) how spatial cognition in infancy supports the acquisition of spatial language, (b) how cross-linguistic distinctions in spatial language are acquired, and (c) how, once acquired, spatial language affects spatial thought. We plan to invite scholars with interdisciplinary perspectives on these problems, including linguists, psychologists, and computer scientists who work on problems of the representation of spatial language and learning. The conference will take place at Johns Hopkins University on June 6-8, 2003, and will include a set of target talks and commentaries, which should stimulate interdisciplinary discussion. The product of the conference will be a published volume or volumes which provide interdisciplinary perspectives on questions of how spatial language is acquired, how it engages spatial cognition in infancy, and how it later affects spatial thought.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The central goal of this research is to understand the nature of spatial representations, its structure, normal development, and breakdown under conditions of genetic deficit. This goal will be accomplished by studying spatial representations in children and adults with Williams syndrome (WS)~ a rare genetic defect which gives rise to an unusual cognitive profile of severe spatial deficit coupled with relatively spared language. People with WS typically show severe deficits in visual construction tasks. Yet they show spared capacities to recognize objects, process visual motion, and talk about space. This unusual pattern of deficit and sparing suggests the broad hypothesis that dorsal stream functions of the brainmany of them parietal functions- are damaged in Williams syndrome. The pattern also suggests that ventral stream functions, such as object recognition may be spared, and that the combination of damage and sparing leads to the unusual spatial profile of WS. We will test the hypotheses that the WS spatial profile (a) reflects breakdown in multiple dorsal-parietal functions, including visual-spatial attention, updating for action, and imaginal transformations, (b) reflects sparing of object representation, a key ventral stream function, and (c) reflects severe delay or arrest at an early point along the normal developmental trajectory. Experimental probes will test these hypotheses in 4 projects examining visual attention, object representation, visual-manual action, and navigation. This research will shed light on theories of the normal architecture of spatial representation, how it develops in children, and its breakdown during development. The latter holds promise for understanding how to enhance normal spatial representations and build upon deficient ones. The research will have broad impact by increasing our understanding of how spatial systems develop in normal and impaired children. This understanding can afford insights to the applied community which depends on such research to develop interventions.

For generations, uncovering the nature of human language has challenged researchers across a range of disciplines. Breakthrough progress requires a highly multidisciplinary yet integrated research effort, necessitating a new kind of language scientist capable of working across traditional disciplinary boundaries. This IGERT award facilitates the development of such scientists, further developing the Problem-Centered Training approach pioneered at Johns Hopkins. Through the programs Computational and Experimental Tracks, trainees will learn to deploy the diversity of methods and perspectives of linguistics, experimental psychology, computer science, cognitive neuroscience and mathematics in the attack of a single problem in the domain of language. Through an international component, trainees will gain experience in the laboratories of foreign pioneers in multiple disciplines, and will engage in research on languages other than English.

Linguistics has been undergoing a revolutionary transformation, expanding its horizons to embrace the full cognitive science of language. Trainees in this IGERT will, through their graduate work and beyond, play a vital role in completing this transformation, and in bridging a number of fundamental schisms currently dividing language science. Breakthroughs arising from a unified science of language will have major long-term impact on language education. In the short term, scientists trained in the Computational Track will transfer insight from linguistic theory to language engineering, impacting commercial and security technology. Through a suite of special outreach mechanisms targeting not only Ph.D. applicants, but also their faculty mentors and a broader undergraduate population, the program promotes the involvement of underrepresented minorities in scientific research. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.

The ability to understand and reason about the spatial relationships among objects supports children's academic readiness and achievements in math and reading yet, we know little about when they emerge or how to improve them during early development. One of the earliest and most accessible windows into spatial skills is children's block play--building structures with physical blocks. Building with blocks is surprisingly complex, which makes it difficult to characterize in detail how children build structures, why they sometimes struggle, and what can be done to improve their skills. Drawing on traditional observational methods and advancements in computer science, this project creates detailed, robust, and automatic techniques for characterizing children's building behaviors and articulating the different building paths taken by "novice" and "expert" child builders. Its multidisciplinary approach advances the frontiers of understanding about how people learn, and how they might use their STEM knowledge more effectively. The tools produced by the project will offer new ways to measure spatial skills in formal and informal learning settings, and has the potential to change the way we think about early block-building as a marker for learning. In this way the project reflects NSF's investments in promising developments that build a coherent, cumulative knowledge base, focusing on high-leverage topics.

Spatial skills represent a fundamental aspect of human knowledge, supporting a wide range of cognitive functions including our ability to create and understand 2- and 3-D spatial representations of information. This project focuses on one of the earliest developing yet highly complex spatial skills--block building--which has garnered attention in both cognitive and educational arenas due to its accessibility and adaptability for young children in formal and informal learning contexts. Consistent with the Education and Human Resources Core Research program's mission of supporting fundamental research on learning in STEM that combines theory, techniques, and perspectives from a wide range of disciplines and contexts, the spatial skills coding system developed in this project combines video and motion tracking of children's block building. This will allow researchers to gather and characterize data from much larger numbers of children than ever before, to relate these data on block-building to other academically-relevant skills, and to use the characterization of child "expert" performance as instructional input to "novice" builders. Its use of traditional cognitive methods along with machine learning techniques to characterize the process of children's block building and how it develops will generate scalable tools that can be used by scientists and educators to characterize, analyze, and promote development of spatial skills in our youngest learners.

This project will provide a better understanding of how preverbal infants represent spatial configurations, and of how linguistic input and experiences with objects in the first four years of life affect early spatial representations. Specifically, in studies of children acquiring spatial language, the project will explore interactions between their understanding of spatial configurations, the language they hear, and their experience with objects. The research will provide detailed understanding of early spatial term development, thus illuminating how these terms might enable the expression of abstract spatial relationships pertinent to STEM-related disciplines. The research also has the potential to contribute to understanding of spatial and language deficits in individuals with developmental disorders (such as autism or William syndrome). Finally, this project will give a diverse set of students from underrepresented groups experience with all aspects of a scientific research project. Mentoring will be conducted by two faculty in different laboratories and Universities, thus offering students exposure to scientific research and instilling in them an appreciation for scientific discovery.

This project is highly inter-disciplinary. It uses an approach that is motivated by linguistic analyses of spatial terms, it proposes clear hypotheses built on findings from studies of infant cognition and language development, and it utilizes state-of-the art research methods for studying infant cognition and language development. The project will study spatial language development by examining three components likely to play a significant role in spatial language acquisition: (a) core spatial concepts, (b) linguistic input, and (c) specific experiences with objects. To systematically test the interaction of these components, the project will focus on the domain of "support." The core concept of "support from below" will be tested in children 6 months to 4.5 years of age, using infant looking time paradigms and early language comprehension paradigms, as well as spontaneous and elicited language production methods. The influence of linguistic input on children's understanding of support will be tested by relating parents' language of support to children's language development, and by relating specific support language, such as "is on" or "sticks to," to children's spatial representations. The influence of children's experience with objects on their understanding of support will be tested by examining how their experiences with object properties relevant for support, such as "stickiness," influence early support understanding.

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Drs. Michael F. Bonner, Chaz Firestone, and Barbara Landau at Johns Hopkins University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating how the human brain represents visual relations. The world is more than a bag of objects: We see not only individual objects and their features (e.g., a fluffy cat or a textured mat) but also how they relate (a cat sitting ON a mat). Relations are a property holding between objects, beyond any properties the objects have on their own. How do we represent such relations? Although relations themselves cast no light onto our eyes, a growing body of work suggests that relations between objects are extracted in rapid and automatic visual processing, much as we automatically perceive an object's shape or color. Despite this, we have surprisingly little understanding of how the human brain represents such relations. For example, does the visual system automatically extract the structure of relations (distinguishing [mat on cat] from [cat on mat])? And might the brain represent relations and the participating objects (e.g., cat, mat, and ON) in an integrated, "compressed" manner (much like a computer might compress the contents of a file or image)? The proposed research aims to provide answers to these and other questions, using a set of physical relations (e.g., containment, support, adhesion, and fit) as a case study. By integrating methods from the fields of vision science and cognitive computational neuroscience, this research will advance our understanding of how the human brain extracts relational information from visual scenes. This research also has broad implications for understanding perceptual processing of physical relations, which are an unexplored but important domain in STEM education and crucial for scientific understanding, e.g., about physical mechanics (such as the movement of gas particles in a container).

The proposed research combines psychophysical, neuroimaging, and computational modeling approaches to pursue three objectives, aimed at characterizing: (1) what properties of relations are perceived, (2) where relational information is represented in the brain, and (3) how relational structure is computed and represented. We focus on physical relations between objects (e.g., containment ["on"] and support ["in"]), as such relations are central to many other processes in the mind, including physical understanding (e.g., if the mat moves, will the cat too?). In the first objective, we will use rapid perceptual tasks to measure the influence of relational properties on similarity judgment behavior. In the second objective, we will identify which areas of the brain encode visual relational information, by identifying brain regions in which the participating objects (e.g., cat, mat) are encoded in an integrated, non-linear manner (i.e., where relational representations are not well-approximated by simple weighted sums of the representations of the participating objects). In the third objective, we will test the hypothesis that the brain implements a compositional representation of visual relations, by asking whether a model that explicitly encodes relational structure (e.g., mat as Supporter, cat as Supported) can predict neural patterns for novel relational scenes. The proposed research engages a new frontier in scene representation: how the human brain computes high-level information about the relational structure of the world. It also has direct implications for theories of spatial cognition, language, and intuitive physics.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.