Sandra R. Waxman - US grants

This proposal addresses fundamental issues of early conceptual development, language development, and the linkages between them. Children, like adults, are faced with an enormously rich environment. Each day, they encounter new objects and witness new events. This diversity would be overwhelming if each object and event were treated as unique. Therefore, an essential task of early childhood is to form categories that capture commonalities among objects and to learn words for these categories. Developmental research has documented that infants and toddlers appreciate many kinds of categories. Their cognitive achievements are concurrent with equally impressive gains in language acquisition. It is unlikely that their conceptual and linguistic advances are entirely independent. Indeed, recent developmental work reveals that particular types of words (e.g., nouns, adjectives) highlight particular types of conceptual relations (e.g., categories of objects, properties of objects). There are, however, two serious limitations in the existing work. First, because most of the existing literature is devoted primarily to preschool children who have already made significant linguistic advances, we have a very limited understanding of how they begin to build these important linkages early in development. Therefore, the proposed studies will chart carefully the emergence of these links in prelinguistic infants and in toddlers by examining the influence of language on their categorization abilities. Second, because the existing research has been based exclusively on English-speaking subjects, it is unclear whether they are universal to human development. The proposed studies will examine these linkages in young children learning languages other than English. They will build upon my preliminary with 2 other Indo-European languages (French , Spanish) and extend the investigation to include ASL, a non-Indo-European language that differs from the languages previously studied in syntax, morphology, and modality of transmission. The prediction is that some linkages (e.g., that between nouns and category relations) will emerge even before the child has made many linguistic advances, will be evident across human languages, and will initially be overextended to include words from other linguistic form classes (e.g., adjectives). In contrast, other links (e.g., that between adjectives and object properties) may emerge later, may rely upon an existing base of linguistic and conceptual knowledge, and may vary according to the specifics of the language being acquired. By combining developmental and cross-linguistic approaches, this research will 1) broaden considerably the empirical and theoretical foundations of existing research, 2) provide a window through which to view more clearly the origins of these powerful and precise linkages between early linguistic and conceptual development, and 3) enrich our understanding of early language and cognitive development.

This project will study children's acquisition knowledge in the domain of biology. The goal is to understand better what biological knowledge children bring to the classroom and how this knowledge is organized to support reasoning and explanation. Although children's understanding of biology has been examined in quite a few studies, little attention has been directed at the question of how biological knowledge might vary in children being raised in different cultural settings and among adults with different levels of experience. Since the existing work in the area suggests that adult conceptions of biological kinds and ecological relationships varies with culture and experience, children's understandings of nature likely also varies with culture and experience. Identifying cross-cultural differences and commonalities in biological knowledge is important if we are to meet the educational goals of the 21st century. It is also important to build theories that reflect accurately the diversity in knowledge and experience of people around the world. The project will include a number of under-studied populations, including urban and rural majority culture children, urban Mexican immigrant children, rural Native American children, rural Yukatek Maya and Ladino children. Children and adults will be given a variety of tasks to probe their underlying biological concepts (e.g. "alive"), processes, and relationships. In addition, the research will examine parent-child dyads and other sources of information that help to shape children's conceptions of biology. The research will test specific theories about which aspects of biological knowledge are likely to be universal, which aspects vary with culture and experience, and how these variations interact with formal instruction. This research is directly relevant to science education. It is important to engage the understandings that children bring to the classroom in order to build on their real world experience and to address misconceptions when they arise. To ignore real world experience would risk failure to understand the educational possibilities for learning about science in general, and biology in particular.

This proposal addresses fundamental issues in the evolution of biological knowledge and reasoning, across cultures and across development. Researchers have long recognized that children are not tabulae rosae. Instead, they bring with them theories and concepts of the world. When these differ radically from those of adults, children's existing theories can be obstacles to learning. Years of research have suggested that the very concepts that adults hold as central (e.g., alive, animal), may be represented in an altogether different fashion in children. Unfortunately, this prior research has focused almost exclusively on middle-class, urban, technologically-advanced populations. This narrow empirical base makes it impossible to determine a) whether the theories held by these children are universal, b) how these early theories are shaped by culture and input conditions, c) how to best characterize the mechanisms underlying developmental change. The goal of this proposal is to redress this limitation by identifying core biological concepts and reasoning in young children from different cultural groups and to trace their developmental trajectories into adulthood. Populations include Chicago (suburban; urban), Wisconsin (rural majority culture; rural native American (Menominee); Mexico (Yukatek Maya; Ladino). dramatically expands the database on concept development and provides new understanding of normative theories by analyzing the various developmental motivations and patterns. Each population participates in 4 series of experiments, each aimed at a different aspect of knowledge within the biological domain. Experimental tasks include: (1) name generation, (2) reasoning tasks, (3) parent-child speech dyads, and (4) ethnographic description of classroom and other instructional content. These developmental, cross-cultural experiments will help us ascertain which biological concepts (if any) are universal, and determine how these are shaped by the culture in which an individual is immersed. Ensuing knowledge of particular cultural conceptions about the biological world and how it works may be critical in understanding the educational possibilities for learning about biology - the new cornerstone of any science curriculum in the twenty-first century - and for maintaining environmental health.

How do language, culture and experience influence children's developing understanding of the natural world in general and of biological concepts in particular? The PIs address these questions through cross-linguistic, cross-cultural and developmental studies. Previous research has been based mainly on children from middle-class, urban, technologically advanced populations. This narrow empirical base limits our ability to determine whether any of the biological concepts held by children are universal, and how children's early concepts are shaped by the linguistic and cultural communities in which they are immersed. With previous NSF funding, the PIs launched a comprehensive investigation of biological knowledge and reasoning in young children and adults from a range of cultural and linguistic communities (e.g. Indonesian, Yukatek Maya), communities that also varied in the richness of their direct experiences with nature (urban, rural European-American, rural Native-American). Cross-linguistic developmental studies established that language affects the development of basic concepts such as "alive." The present project will broaden our base of languages (Polish, Bulgarian, Turkish) to pursue linguistic influences in the development of biological concepts. Recent evidence from the investigators suggests that, in contrast to previous theorizing, a human-centered biology is neither an inevitable stage of development nor an automatic result of impoverished experience with plants and animals. Instead it appears that an anthropocentric biology is a learned cultural model. The goal for the current proposal is to deepen our understanding of cultural models for relating to nature and to explore their role in the development of children's understanding of biology. The investigators will use a variety of measurements and learning and reasoning tasks to examine how children integrate and coordinate different sources of knowledge and cultural models (e.g. discourse with parents, books, Disney movies, Discovery channel) related to nature.

This proposal represents basic science, but it also is relevant to a number of national and practical goals. By sharpening our understanding of what biological knowledge young children from various cultural groups (urban and rural Native-American as well as U.S. majority culture) bring to their U.S. classrooms, we should be able to improve science instruction. The diversity of our study populations allows us to determine which patterns of development have broad generality and, where we observe variation, to understand how cultural practices shape understandings of biology. The studies of the role of language may also suggest strategies for reducing the confusion between everyday uses of biological kind terms (e.g. "alive") and concepts needed in school (e.g. "living thing"). No less important, the research will make significant strides to increase the diversity of the populations being studied and the researchers studying them, reinforce research partnerships, and foster research infrastructure as a means of empowering tribal institutions in the domain of scientific research, educational policy and educational practice.

The current project is designed to discover how fundamental biological concepts are understood in different learning contexts and across different cultural groups. Mainstream European-American and Native-American populations are compared to discover how concepts of the natural world are shaped by different belief systems and practices; urban and rural populations are compared to discover how both direct contact with the natural world and exposure to popular media influence learning and reasoning. The investigators attempt to tease apart: a) various sources of environmental input (e.g., habitual contact with the natural world, native language, and belief systems); b) various formal and informal contexts (e.g., school and home settings); and c) various media of transmission (e.g., books, videos, and conversation). The research protocol includes an array of categorization and reasoning tasks that have been adapted to suit the cultural profiles of each community. In addition, the project involves an analysis of the cultural practices and the input that parents and teachers provide to children. Focal content points of this proposal are children's intuitions about the place of humans in the natural world (e.g., anthrocentrism) and their tendency to engage in ecological or taxonomic reasoning. An integral component of this research program is its integration of members of under-represented communities and building of infrastructures to support their lasting involvement in research.

Humans are uniquely endowed with a natural capacity for building complex, flexible, and creative conceptual and linguistic systems. This project provides a window through which to view the link between these two uniquely human systems -- across development and across languages. An essential developmental task for human infants is to form concepts that capture the commonalities and relations among the objects and events they encounter, and to learn words to express them. Even before infants begin to speak, these developmental tasks are powerfully linked. Infants begin the task of word learning with a broad, universal expectation. This sets the stage for the emergence of more specific expectations, linking particular kinds of words (e.g., noun, verb) to particular kinds of meaning (e.g., object- and event-based commonalities). These more specific expectations emerge in a cascading fashion over the first two years, tuned by the structure of the infant's native language. Past research has underscored the vital interaction between infants' broad early expectations and the shaping role of their native language environment. The overarching goal of the current project is to concentrate on the two types of evidence -- developmental and cross-linguistic -- that will reveal how the links between words and concepts unfold. Focusing on the second year of life, the experiments trace the acquisition of two kinds of words -- nouns and verbs -- in infants acquiring either English or Mandarin. Evidence from Mandarin offers a clear linguistic counterpoint to English and will engage, for the first time, a long-standing debate concerning whether and how infants' lexical and conceptual development are shaped by the language being acquired. The results will provide a detailed analysis of infants' emerging capacities in concept and word learning. Recruiting state-of-the-art time-series analyses, the project will identify with precision how 18- and 24-month-old infants deploy their visual attention as they are engaged in the very process of mapping novel words to meaning. The project will also clarify not only whether infants at a particular age can successfully learn new word meanings, but will also shed light on the efficiency with which they do so.

This research will lead to fundamental advancements in scientific knowledge. Focusing on English and Mandarin, it will identify, for the first time, the impact of these distinctly different ambient languages on infants' language and conceptual development. In addition, there is a strong training component aimed at bringing members of underrepresented groups into the research process. By illuminating developmental patterns and processes in two distinct languages, this project will provide a means to better understanding how infants acquiring languages other than English learn words and concepts. This will advance the nation's efforts to promote positive developmental outcomes for the ever-increasing number of infants and young children in the U.S. from non-English-speaking home environments. By identifying the kinds of visual and linguistic support required for successful word learning, this basic research may also serve as a springboard for developing targeted interventions for infants and young children diagnosed with language delay or impairments. Tailoring the amount and kind information to capitalize on these children's strengths may prove especially effective in treatment.

The research will clarify the effect of words on categorization in the first months of life and trace the developmental trajectory of this effect over the first year of life. The starting point for these studies is a recent demonstration by the investigators that words promoted object categorization in infants as young as 3 months, and do so in a way that carefully matched tones do not. This result opens several new avenues for investigation, each of which will bear on fundamental questions concerning the relation between language and conceptual organization in the first year of life. The project will identify what it is about speech stimuli that promote object categorization over and above the effect of tone sequences in infants so young. The proposed experiments test the hypothesis that human speech engenders in very young infants a heightened attention to the surrounding objects, and that this very general attentional effect later becomes more specific as infants become attuned to the speech sounds of their own ambient language. Pursuing this hypothesis requires an examination of 3- to 12-month-old infants' treatment of a broad range of auditory stimuli. To discover whether the facilitative effect of words on categorization is specific to linguistic stimuli or evident for other complex stimuli as well, the proposed experiments use a preferential-looking task. In this task, the infant is presented with a series of individual pictures followed by a test trial in which the infant is presented with a novel and a familiar picture side-by-side, and the investigators measure how much time the infant spends looking at each picture. The project investigates the effects of auditory stimuli including naturalistic speech from a range of languages, filtered speech, backwards speech, mammal vocalizations, and bird calls. Another focus of this project is to investigate the developmental trajectory for infants growing up in bilingual homes.

The project, focused on typically-developing infants, will have broad impact on theories of normative development in monolingual and bilingual infants and will have implications for interventions with atypically-developing infants and young children. The research focuses on two uniquely human capacities -- language and conceptual development -- and explores an emerging link between them. By mapping out the development of this link, the proposed studies will put practitioners in a better position to identify patterns that deviate from typical development. Moreover, by considering infants growing up bilingual, this work will address crucial questions about consequences of processing two languages in the first years of life, and will advance efforts to promote positive developmental outcomes for the ever-increasing number of bilingual infants and young children in the United States. Finally, this basic research can also serve as a springboard for developing targeted interventions for young children diagnosed with language delay and impairments, as well as those diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorders.

The objective of this project is to examine the role of culture in the development of children's knowledge of and reasoning about the natural world. This project builds on previous work that found cultural differences in science-related practices such as observation, hypothesis formation, and explanation. It also extends design research to preschool contexts with both Native and European-American children, with the goal of finding ways to design rigorous science learning environments for young children. The study populations include both urban and rural Native-American and (mainly) European-American children. The studies include adults and children of different ages, with tasks tailored to each sample. This will achieve a more comprehensive view of the development of understandings of nature. The project is a collaborative effort between TERC, the American Indian Center of Chicago, the Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin, and Northwestern University. The overall goal is to improve science learning by bringing informal, out-of-school learning to bear on more formal, school-based science learning.

The project employs an integration of multiple methods and measures to conduct three sets of studies. 1. Studies of input conditions and learning in everyday contexts. 2. More formal cognitive science studies of children's learning and conceptual organization. 3. Community-based design experiments focused on science learning. In different ways, each of these methods allows the project to further develop, test, and examine the educational implications of proposed theories of how culture affects science learning. This research project offers extensive cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary research opportunities for pre- and post-doctoral research trainees. Members of Native American communities have increasingly become involved on related project as PIs, research assistants, and graduate fellows. An important aspect of this project is resource development and capacity building in Native-American institutions.

This research should have strong impacts on theories of cognitive and conceptual development, especially those pertaining to how children's and adults' existing knowledge is shaped by culture and experience. It should also promote an expansive view of cultural practices, including contact with the natural world, community forms of engagement, and parent-child interactions. The project develops classroom practices that, if successful, have excellent potential for scaling up and generality. Moreover, this project will provide a deeper understanding of the developmental processes underlying cross-cultural similarities and differences in science learning. This will serve as an essential resource in national and local efforts to advance the education of children enrolled in US schools, including the increasing number of children from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The experiments described in this proposal investigate the process by which young children learn new words. Children as young as two years old can rapidly assign a meaning to a new word that they hear. There is a strong intuitive assumption that to establish this meaning, learners must hear the word in the presence of its referent, for example, hearing [kaet] in the presence of a cat, or [kIk] in the presence of a kickig action. Yet, in the natural course of events, words, especially verbs, are often introduced in the absence of their referents (e.g., Let's pack our bag). Strikingly, analyses reveal that when conversing with their young children, most of the verbs produced by mothers refer to absent events. How, then, do they establish meaning for new verbs? We aim to develop a paradigm and offer an empirical foundation to address this issue. We do so by presenting 2-year-olds with novel verbs in linguistic contexts only, without a relevant visual scene. After a delay, we offer them candidate visual events to determine if they have (a) assigned meaning to the novel verbs, and (b) can recall these meanings even after a delay. We also assess whether a period of sleep during the delay helps toddlers integrate the new verb into their existing lexical knowledge. The proposed work aims to characterize the process of vocabulary acquisition. Understanding the mechanisms of language acquisition is crucial not only to a theoretical understanding of language acquisition and cognitive development, but also has implications for helping children with developmental delays. The research described here contributes to a growing base of knowledge about learning in typically-developing children, which is key in understanding how learning may diverge in children with language delays and disabilities.

? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): NIH - Linking language and cognition in infancy: Entry points and developmental change this proposal addresses fundamental issues of early language and conceptual development, and forges a precise link between them in infants' first year of life. Infants live in an enormously rich environment. Each day, they encounter new objects, while listening to a rich repertoire of sounds, including the sounds of their language. Amidst this richness, infants must identify the sounds of their native language and discover how these are linked to the world around them. Even before infants begin to speak, they identify the sounds of their language and link them to foundations of meaning. By 3 months of age, language supports infants' ability to form object categories. Initially, this link between language and cognition is quite broad: vocalizations of both human and non-human primates promote the formation of object categories. By 6 months, this link is tuned specifically to human vocalizations. The current proposal is designed to specify the scope of infants' initial link and t trace how it unfolds over the first year. Recruiting state-of-the-art analyses, this proposal will illuminate the developmental path infants take as they narrow in on the communicative signals of their species and link these signals to the foundations of meaning. Series I is designed to identify the range of signals that initially promote object categorization in human infants and how these are tuned over the first year. The studies examine infants' responses to vocalizations produced by human and non-human primates, mammals and birds, and also to manually-produced signals of sign language (ASL). Series II is designed to uncover how (and when) infants' exposure to language and other signals in the environment shapes the very possibility that they will link these signals to cognition. The studies, which examine infants' plasticity, wil pinpoint critical developmental windows for promoting language and conceptual development in all infants. Series III is designed to identify how infants come to interpret a signal (spoken or signed) as communicative. Taking infants' exquisite sensitivity to social cues (e.g., eye gaze) as a starting point, the studies consider whether infants interpret any signal (e.g., a tone sequence) as communicative if it is embedded within a rich communicative exchange. Humans are uniquely endowed with a natural capacity to build complex, flexible and creative systems of language and thought. This proposal, which forges a precise link between these systems, has far-reaching theoretical and practical implications. The proposed project broadens significantly the empirical and theoretical foundations of current research, and provides a window into the origins and evolution of infants' earliest links between conceptual and linguistic development. This work underscores the vital interaction between infants' natural endowments and the shaping role of the environment. It also builds a strong foundation for identifying infants with language delay or impairment, and serves as a springboard for designing targeted interventions to bolster their language and cognition.