Jesse Snedeker - US grants

Every year thousands of children are internationally adopted into American families. Like infants these children must learn a language by listening, playing and watching what happens around them. However, these children differ from infants in one critical respect-they are much older and presumably more cognitively mature. With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Jesse Snedeker will compare how adopted children and infants learn English by collecting parental reports and analyzing samples of the children's speech. When infants learn to speak, they go through a predictable series of stages. For example, they usually produce single words for months before they begin combining words. The scientific goal of this project is to find out whether adopted preschoolers go through the same stages. This will help us understand the role of cognitive development and maturation in shaping early language development.

This project will have three kinds of broader impacts. First, it will provide research opportunities and training for undergraduate and graduate students. Second, this project will give parents and clinicians a clearer picture of the typical course of language development in internationally-adopted children, which may reduce unnecessary anxiety and aid in the early identification of language disorders. Finally, examining the conditions in which language is learned in this population may help us to understand and foster second-language learning in other groups of children

Decades of research has demonstrated that adult listeners rapidly integrate many kinds of information to determine the syntactic and semantic relations between words in an utterance. The study of children's language processing, however, is still in its infancy. This is largely because most of the methods used to study adult comprehension involve reading or secondary tasks too difficult for young children. In recent years this has changed: Several researchers have demonstrated that children's eye-movements can provide detailed information about the moment-to-moment processes involved in spoken-language comprehension. The present project will build on these initial findings, using the eye-gaze paradigm to investigate syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic processes in children from 3 to 7 years of age. The PI will examine three specific questions: First, what information do children use to determine the syntactic structure of an utterance? Children's interpretation of ambiguous sentences will be used to explore the roles of prosody, word knowledge, and semantic plausibility. Second, what kinds of grammatical representations are used during language comprehension? A priming paradigm will be used to explore the nature and scope of these structural categories. Third, does children's language comprehension provide any evidence for the theoretical distinction between the meaning of an utterance (semantics) and the inferences that we make upon hearing it (pragmatics)? Children's eye-movements will be analyzed to determine whether they spontaneously make pragmatic inferences when listening to unambiguous utterances. Although the development of the language comprehension system is of importance in its own right, this work will also provide insight into: children's syntactic representations, the architecture of adult language processing, and the relation between word learning and syntactic development.

This research will map out the development of higher-level language comprehension processes. Strong language comprehension skills are essential to cognitive and social development. Spoken language is the primary means by which young children are socialized and educated. Their knowledge of distant places, family relations, and abstract entities develops largely by listening to adults. Literacy also builds upon children's ability to understand spoken language, as evidenced by robust connections between preschool language comprehension and later reading abilities. By tracing the development of these language comprehension processes from three years of age, this research may provide insight into why some children seem to have great difficulties in comprehension and what can be done to facilitate the development of these skills. As this project proceeds, it will provide unique educational opportunities for several graduate and undergraduate students.

The Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences offers postdoctoral research fellowships to provide opportunities for recent doctoral graduates to obtain additional training, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden their scientific horizons beyond their undergraduate and graduate training. Postdoctoral fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including at foreign locations. This postdoctoral fellowship trains an interdisciplinary scientist exploring the Psycholinguistics of Morality, which is a fascinating subject at the intersection of social psychology and linguistics.

Research in cognitive science and social-moral psychology indicates that people make lightning fast causal and moral judgments when they encounter information communicating harmful interpersonal events, and that social attitudes factor into judgments of blameworthiness. However, other research in linguistics suggests that representations of causation may be primarily rooted in basic properties of language including verb meaning, and, thus, are largely impervious to social category information and motivation. This research examines the extent to which causal attribution for morally-relevant events -- including violence and coercion -- is determined by a social-cognitive architecture revealed in patterns of language processing. Thus, it bridges a gap between these disciplines and represents the launch of a new interdisciplinary area of concentration: the psycholinguistics of morality. Specifically, this project investigates whether implied gender and race in minimal language sets up implicit causal representations of an event to be biased toward the sentence subject or object before any substantive information about an event is communicated ? a possibility with profound implications for our understanding of everyday judgment and decision-making. Moreover, this project investigates the extent to which information about distinctiveness and mental state capacities shifts implicit causal attributions, and, downstream, explicit causal attributions (i.e., self-compassion and self-blame). Legal arguments, the news media, educational materials, psychotherapeutic interventions, and public health warnings often draw upon people?s intuitive statistical models (e.g., by using statements about distinctiveness, or whether outcomes are likely to affect particular people or groups) and emphasize mental state information (e.g., by using statements about people?s capacities for thinking and planning versus feeling and sensing). Thus, this research has implications for the use of this information in messaging in multiple domains of everyday life. Finally, by determining the extent to which explicit causal attribution can be altered through these cognitive-linguistic pathways, this project also paves the way for potential broader positive impacts, including interventions aimed at attenuating inappropriate blaming and improving day-to-day well-being.

A series of behavioral studies in three phases unites methods from psychology and linguistics in order to track causal processing inaccessible to conscious awareness through patterns in language processing. Phase 1 maps the effects of implied gender and race on linguistic signatures of causal attribution for morally-relevant actions and determines their connections with: a) social attitudes, b) representations of distinctiveness (i.e., intuitive statistical models), and c) representations of mental states. Phase 2 directly tests effects on implicit causality from interventions on two potential cognitive mechanisms: representations of (a) distinctiveness, and (b) mental state capacities. Phase 3 involves determining effects on explicit causal attribution (i.e., self-compassion and self-blame) from interventions on implicit causality. Besides revealing the complexity of causal processing of morally-relevant action in language and thought, the project addresses specific concerns within and across disciplines. For linguistics, these studies aim to inform the critical project of delineating intrinsic properties of the lexicon from extrinsic effects on language from world knowledge. For social-moral psychology, these studies bring new focus to the role of purely linguistic features in moral judgment of human behavior. And, by increasing understanding of the consequences of shifting causal representations in language and thought, this research addresses issues at the intersection of linguistics, cognitive science, and social-moral psychology, including the extent to which explicit causal models are alterable through interventions on implicit causality via general cognitive representations (e.g., models of distinctiveness and/or mental state capacities).

PROJECT SUMMARY Understanding spoken language involves a cascade of processes that allow us to perceive speech sounds, identify the words that are being spoken, connect them together to determine the meaning of the sentence, and use the conversational context to infer the message the speaker is trying to convey. In adults, these processes are linked together such that perception at a lower level is shaped by expectations formed at higher levels. For example, we identify a word not only on the basis of the sounds we hear (phonological input) but also based on the meaning of the sentence, and conversation, in which it occurs. These high-level constraints help us anticipate how a sentence will continue as it unfolds in real time. This ability is critical for fluent language comprehension, but we are just beginning to understand how it develops, in part because the paradigms commonly used in adults involve listening to long lists of unrelated sentences with no clear goal in mind. The proposed project addresses this vital gap by developing a new child-friendly paradigm for studying comprehension using event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded during a natural listening task (ERP's are measures of brain activity). Children listen to a story as ERPs time-locked to the onset of every word are recorded. This allows for the collection of a large amount of data in a short time in an ecologically-valid and fun task. The proposed experiments use this task to study a brain signature of word recognition (the N400) to compare the degree to which word recognition depends on properties of the word (e.g., its frequency) as opposed to high-level expectations (e.g., the predictability of the word in context). Exp. 1 tracks how the use of these two constraints changes between 5-6 years of age and adulthood and how these skills relate to language ability and literacy. Exp. 2 adapts the task for preschool-aged children to determine if they also use contextual cues. Exp. 3 explores how the use of context in word identification is affected by errors in the sentence, in a design that combines the natural listening task with a tightly controlled experimental manipulation. The paradigm developed in the proposal could be applied to a wide variety of questions about language comprehension and used in clinical populations that are difficult to study with traditional designs. Tracing the development of moment-to-moment language comprehension is central to understanding how children become fluent listeners. This is an essential first step for identifying the atypical patterns of development that characterize disorders such as specific language impairment, autism, and dyslexia. Because literacy builds on oral language, this work may also ultimately inform educational interventions.

Contact PD/PI: Snedeker, Jesse PROJECT SUMMARY Understanding spoken language involves a cascade of processes that allow us to perceive speech sounds, identify the words that are being spoken, connect them together to determine the meaning of the sentence, and use the conversational context to infer the message the speaker is trying to convey. In adults, these processes are linked together such that perception at a lower level is shaped by expectations formed at higher levels. For example, we identify a word not only on the basis of the sounds we hear (phonological input) but also based on the meaning of the sentence, and conversation, in which it occurs. These high-level constraints help us anticipate how a sentence will continue as it unfolds in real time. This ability is critical for fluent language comprehension, but we are just beginning to understand how it develops, in part because the paradigms commonly used in adults involve listening to long lists of unrelated sentences with no clear goal in mind. The proposed project addresses this vital gap by developing a new child-friendly paradigm for studying comprehension using event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded during a natural listening task (ERP's are measures of brain activity). Children listen to a story as ERPs time-locked to the onset of every word are recorded. This allows for the collection of a large amount of data in a short time in an ecologically-valid and fun task. The proposed experiments use this task to study a brain signature of word recognition (the N400) to compare the degree to which word recognition depends on properties of the word (e.g., its frequency) as opposed to high-level expectations (e.g., the predictability of the word in context). Exp. 1 tracks how the use of these two constraints changes between 5-6 years of age and adulthood and how these skills relate to language ability and literacy. Exp. 2 adapts the task for preschool-aged children to determine if they also use contextual cues. Exp. 3 explores how the use of context in word identification is affected by errors in the sentence, in a design that combines the natural listening task with a tightly controlled experimental manipulation. The paradigm developed in the proposal could be applied to a wide variety of questions about language comprehension and used in clinical populations that are difficult to study with traditional designs. Tracing the development of moment-to-moment language comprehension is central to understanding how children become fluent listeners. This is an essential first step for identifying the atypical patterns of development that characterize disorders such as specific language impairment, autism, and dyslexia. Because literacy builds on oral language, this work may also ultimately inform educational interventions. Page 6 Project Summary/Abstract