Susan Goldin-Meadow - US grants

Are there moments in a child's development when he is particularly ready to make the transition from one knowledge state to another? Previous work by the investigator suggests that this is so -- a child in an unstable knowledge state with respect to a given concept is likely to be susceptible to input in that concept. The proposed studies will continue this line of research and implement two techniques for tapping this unstable knowledge state: (1) Gesture/Speech Discordance, which identifies a child as being in an unstable knowledge state if, in his explanations of a given concept, the information conveyed in his gestures is inconsistent with the information conveyed in his speech, and 2) Proximal Zone, which explores the breadth of the child's unstable knowledge state by observing the additional information expressed by the child when an adult structures a concept task versus when the child works on his own. The relationship between stability of knowledge and learning will be studied in two concepts: conservation and mathematical associativity. 120 boys and girls, 5-8 years old will participate in the conservation studies. Eighty boys and girls, 9-12 years old will participate in the conservation studies. Both populations will be drawn from a variety of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. A series of 6 videotaped experiments will be used: 1) to assess each child's basic level of understanding of the concept, 2) to assess the stability of the child's knowledge (via the Gesture/Speech Discordance measure) and to characterize the nature of that knowledge (via the Proximal Zone measure) and 3) to determine, in a training study, whether a child identified as unstable with respect to a given concept is more likely to benefit from input in that concept than a child identified as stable, and in a longitudinal study, whether a child in an unstable knowledge state will progress to the next level of understanding of the concept sooner than a child in a stable knowledge state. The techniques used in the proposed studies are designed to identify changing states of knowledge. The goal of these studies is to provide information about the role the child's own knowledge state might play in concept acquisition, and thus to contribute toward a general understanding of knowledge states, both static and in flux.

This project will observe profoundly deaf children of hearing parents who have not exposed them to manual language (such as American Sign Language). In previous work, the PI and her associates have found that despite such impoverished language- learning conditions, an American deaf child could develop a gestural communication system structured at the word/morphological level. The current project observes Chinese deaf children of hearing parents who also have not been exposed to any manual language to see whether they, too, develop a gesture system structured at the word level despite the different cultural context. A longitudinal comparison of ten American deaf children and five Chinese deaf children in similar circumstances, recorded on videotape and transcribed, will show whether the home-sign gestural systems developed by such children is similar or whether it is affected by input from the hearing parents, who in turn are affected by their different cultures and typologically different languages.

It is commonly asked whether language is learned or innate. This proposal recasts the question so that it is amenable to investigation, asking which aspects of language development are more (or less) sensitive to linguistic and environmental input. The proposal describes a research plan to identify the properties of language whose development can withstand wide variations in learning conditions -- the "resilient" properties of language. Children who have not been exposed to conventional linguistic input will be observed in order to determine which properties of language can be developed under one set of severely degraded input conditions. The subjects of the study are deaf children with hearing losses so extensive that they cannot naturally acquire oral language, and born to hearing parents who have not yet exposed them to a manual language. Under such inopportune conditions, one might expect no symbolic communication at all or, at the least, communication which is unlike conventional language. This turns out not to be the case. Previous research has shown that, despite these impoverished language-learning conditions, American deaf children were able to develop gestural communication systems which were structured as are the early communication systems of children acquiring language from conventional language models. The proposed research will determine whether deaf children lacking conventional language models in another culture (a Chinese culture) can develop gesture systems that are similarly structured, i.e., the project will determine the resilience of various properties of language in the face of wide cultural variation. Study 1 will explore how hearing mothers of deaf children between the ages of 3 and 5 interact with their children in Taiwan and in America, and thus will attempt to verify the assumption that mothers interact quite differently with their children in Chinese and American cultures. Study 2 will explore the spontaneous gestures that Chinese and American mothers produce when interacting with their deaf children. In so doing, the study will determine the type of gestural model that the deaf child in each culture receives as input. If the mothers in the two cultures do provide their deaf children with different gestural models, it becomes particularly important to ask whether the deaf children's gesture systems are more comparable to their mothers' gesture systems or to one another. Thus, Study 3 will analyze the gestures produced by the Chinese deaf children, and compare them to the gestures produced by the American deaf children. It is precisely the properties of language which are found in the gestures of both groups of children (and not in the gestures of the mothers) that can be said to be resilient across cultural variation. Study 4 will attempt to put these studies of gesture in a cultural context by exploring the gestures of four hearing mothers and their hearing children (between the ages of 3 and 4) in each culture, and comparing these observations to the data gathered on the Chinese and American hearing mothers and their deaf children.

DESCRIPTION: (Adapted from investigator's abstract) Learning involves moving from a less adequate to a more adequate understanding of a task. Unfortunately, in many studies of learning, performance is described before and after the task has been mastered while little attention it paid to the transition between these states. The absence of focus on transition may reflect difficulties inherent in identifying the fleeting transitional state that occurs between the more stable endpoints of learning. Although many different operational definitions of the transitional period have been proposed, few have stood up to empirical verification. On the basis of empirical evidence, a model is proposed of transitions in learning which holds that the learner, when on the verge of making progress in a problem, entertains more than one hypothesis with respect to the problem and does so in a single response. Evidence for such a model is derived from the observation that children who are in a transitional state with respect to a problem (as evidenced by their readiness to profit from instruction in the problem) frequently produce two distinct hypotheses, one in gesture and a different one in speech, in a single explanation. Thus, the mismatch between the information conveyed in gesture and the information conveyed in speech distinguishes those who are on the threshold of learning from those who are not. However, children in transition may not be aware that they have considered a problem from more than one point of view, since one of their two hypotheses is encoded in gesture. Indeed, gesture may tap knowledge that the child cannot explicitly articulate yet nevertheless appears to understand, albeit implicitly. The purpose of the proposed studies is to explore the knowledge reflected uniquely in gesture and its role in the acquisition of concepts. The studies have three aims: (1) To test the hypothesis that spontaneous gesture, when it conveys information not encoded in speech, provides insight into the implicit information a child possesses. Study 1 employs a recognition paradigm, often used to tap implicit knowledge, to determine whether the knowledge a child demonstrates in gesture but not in speech is apparent in some other aspect of the child's behavior; children, ages 9 to 10, will participate in the study. (2) To test the hypothesis that spontaneous gesture reflects the leading edge of a child's competence, and thus expresses the areas in which the child will benefit from instruction. In Study 2, children, ages 9 to 10, will be given instruction tailored to the information they convey uniquely in their gestures in order to determine whether the children are particularly likely to benefit from such instruction. (3) To test the hypothesis that spontaneous gesture, occurring as it does in communicative contexts, provides an observable index of a child's implicit understanding of a problem, not only for experimenters trained in gesture coding, but also for untrained adults; if so, spontaneous gesture would provide a mechanism by which individuals who interact with a child can calibrate their input to the child s zone proximal development. Study 3 asks whether the spontaneous gestures children produce are interpretable by adults not trained in gesture coding. Study 4 asks whether untrained adults use the information they glean from gesture to alter the way they instruct a child.

DESCRIPTION (Adapted from the Investigator's Abstract): What might it mean to say that language is innate or, alternatively, that language must be learned? This proposal attempts to articulate these questions in terms that lend themselves to experimental investigation, asking which aspects of language development are so overdetermined in humans that they will appear even under learning conditions that vary widely from the typical. The subjects of the studies are deaf children whose hearing parents have not yet exposed them to sign language, and whose hearing losses are so profound as to preclude the acquisition of spoken language. Despite their lack of an accessible conventional language to use as a model for communication, these children do communicate and do so using a gestural system that is structured at both word and sentence levels. Moreover, the gestures they use are structured differently from the gestures used by the hearing individuals around them. Although the deaf children's gesture systems are not patterned after the spontaneous gestures of their hearing parents, it is possible that other non-linguistic aspects of the children's social environment influence the structure of their gestures. In order to determine the extent to which the structures in the deaf children's gestures are shaped by the way in which mothers and children jointly interact in their culture -- and in so doing, explore the "resilience" of these structures across wide cultural variation -- deaf children of hearing parents in a second culture will be observed. Study 1 explores the interactions of hearing mothers and their deaf children (ages 3-5) in Taiwan and in America, testing the hypothesis that mothers interact differently with their children in Chinese and American cultures. Study 2 explores the spontaneous gestures produced by Chinese and American mothers when interacting with their deaf children, clarifying the gestural model presented to the deaf child in each culture. If the mothers in the two cultures do provide their deaf children with different gestural models, do the deaf children's gesture systems more closely resemble their mothers' gesture systems or one another's? Study 3 analyzes the gestures produced by the Chinese deaf children, and compares them to the gestures produced by the American deaf children. It is precisely the properties of language which are found in the gestures of both groups of children (and not in the gestures of the mothers) that can be said to be resilient across cultural variation. Study 4 attempts to put these studies of gesture in a cultural context by exploring the gestures of hearing mothers and their hearing children (ages 3-5) in each culture, and comparing these observations to the data gathered on the Chinese and American hearing mothers and their deaf children.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): What might it mean to say that language is innate or, alternatively, that language must be learned? This proposal attempts to articulate these questions in terms that lend themselves to experimental investigation, asking which aspects of language development are so over-determined that they will appear even under learning conditions that vary widely from the norm. The participants are deaf children whose hearing parents have not yet exposed them to sign language, and whose hearing losses are so profound as to preclude acquisition of spoken language. Despite their lack of an accessible conventional language model, these children do communicate, developing gesture systems that are structured in language-like ways. Moreover, Chinese deaf children of hearing parents develop the same gesture systems as their American counterparts, suggesting that the deaf children's gesture systems are resilient, not only to the absence of a conventional language model, but also to cultural variation. Where do these deaf children's gesture systems come from? One candidate is the gestures hearing adults produce as they talk. Indeed, the gestures of Mandarin speakers are similar in type to those of English speakers. However, the gestures adults use when speaking languages typologically distinct from Mandarin and English - verb-framed languages such as Spanish or Turkish - differ strikingly from the gestures used by speakers of satellite-framed languages such as English or Mandarin. These four cultures thus offer an opportunity to examine effects of hearing speakers' gestures on the gesture systems developed by deaf children. If deaf children in all four cultures develop gesture systems with the same structure despite differences in the gestures they see, the children themselves must be bringing strong biases to the communication situation. The project has four aims: (1) To describe how adult speakers of Spanish or Turkish gesture differently from adult speakers of Mandarin or English. (2) To determine whether gesture systems created by Spanish and Turkish deaf children of hearing parents are structured as are gesture systems created by Chinese and American deaf children despite differences in the gestural models they see. (3) To describe how Spanish, Turkish, Chinese and American hearing children use gestures differently from deaf children in these same cultures even though they see hearing adults using the same gestures. (4) To determine whether Spanish, Turkish, Chinese and American hearing adults, when asked to use gesture as their sole means of communication, produce gestures structured like the deaf child's.

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Acquiring the ability to communicate using natural language and symbolic gestures is a uniquely human capacity that underlies the exchange of information among people. There is as yet no consensus concerning how susceptible this process is to environmental and biological variation. The proposed Program Project focuses on this issue, exploring the extent and the limits of the language-learning process. To examine language growth in the face of environmental variation (Project I), 60 children, selected to represent the demographic range of the Chicago area, were observed between the ages of 14 and 58 mos. and will continue to be followed as they enter school and learn to read. Assessments will be made of child spontaneous speech, along with narrative and reading skills from 5 to 10 years. Using these data, growth curves will be constructed for each child to track language and reading development across time, and to examine children's linguistic and reading progress in the later years (5-10 yrs.) in relation to their developmental trajectory during the early years (14-58 mos.). To explore language growth in the face of biological variation (Project III), 40 children with unilateral brain injury who were observed from 14 to 58 mos. will be followed from 5 to 10 years with an eye toward determining whether environmental variation plays the same role in predicting their language and reading growth as it does in children who have not suffered brain injury. Along with traditional measures, two additional probes will be used. (1) Gesture will be examined in children from Projects l-lll to determine whether children who are delayed in speech relative to their peers use gesture to compensate for those delays (Project II). (2) The brain bases underlying linguistic and gestural competence will be assessed in children from Projects l-lll using fMRI techniques (Project IV). [unreadable] Three cores will provide broad support to the projects: the Administrative Core A, the Data Collection and Transcription Core B, and the Statistical Core C. The proposed work builds on five years of longitudinal data in a diverse sample, and thus offers a unique opportunity to explore the impact that early language learning has on the oral and written skills that children develop once schooling has begun. The data have the potential to shed light on the factors that contribute to the gap between children from high vs. low socioeconomic groups on the first day of school, and may even point to ways of shrinking that gap. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]

DESCRIPTION: (provided by applicant) Acquiring the ability to communicate using natural language and symbolic gestures is a uniquely human capacity that underlies the exchange of information among people. There is as yet no consensus concerning how susceptible this process is to environmental and biological variation. The proposed Program Project focuses on this issue, exploring the extent and the limits of the language-learning process. To examine language growth in the face of environmental variation (Project I), a group of children selected to reflect the demographic distribution within the Chicago area will be observed longitudinally, both at home and at daycare, with an eye toward determining the relation between variations in the speech of caregivers and variations in children's language skills. Assessments will be made of child production and comprehension, and adult input, at 4-month intervals from 14 to 58 mos. Using these data, growth curves will be constructed for each child to track language development across time, and to examine the child's linguistic progress in relation to changes in input. To explore language growth in the face of biological variation (Project III), a group of children with unilateral brain injury will be observed from 14 to 58 mos. with an eye toward describing their language growth, and determining whether environmental variation plays the same role in predicting their growth as it does in children who have not suffered brain injury. Along with traditional measures, two additional probes will be used. (1) The child's communicative competence, and the child's communicative input, will be assessed using gesture as well as speech (Project II). Gesture will be examined in both the brain injured and intact groups to determine whether children who are delayed in speech relative to their peers use gesture to compensate for those delays, and to determine whether the gestures caregivers produce along with their own speech predict individual differences in child language growth. (2) The brain bases underlying communicative competence will be assessed using fMRI techniques (Project IV). The linguistic and gestural skills of individuals who have suffered brain injury at different points in their development will be assessed; fMRI probes will then be used to determine which cortical areas are involved in linguistic and gestural functioning following brain injury occurring at different ages. Three cores provide broad support to the projects: the Administrative Core A, the Data Collection and Transcription Core B, and the Statistical Core C.

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The gestures that children produce when they talk are clearly associated with learning. At a minimum, they serve as an index of the child's readiness-to-learn. The goal of the proposed research is to determine whether gesture not only reflects thought but also plays a role in shaping it. The research has two aims. Aim 1: Does gesture play a role in the learning process? Gesture conveys information in a visuospatial format distinct from the verbal format of speech. It thus offers an alternative representation of "to-be learned" information that may be particularly accessible to a child on the cusp of learning. To explore the effect that other peoples' gestures have on child learning, Studies 1-3 manipulate the gestures children receive during instruction and observe the effect of that manipulation on learning. Gesture also allows children to use a visuospatial format to convey information that they might not be ready to convey in a verbal format. Once represented in the system, this information could then catalyze change. To explore the role that the child's own gestures play in learning, Studies 4-6 manipulate the gestures that children produce and observe the effect on learning. Aim 2: What is the mechanism underlying gesture's role in learning? Gesturing while speaking has been found to reduce the speaker's cognitive burden and increase working memory. Since listeners with more working memory are good at excluding irrelevant material, gesturing while speaking might help children focus on relevant information and thus lead to better learning. To explore the effect that producing gesture has on working memory, Studies 7-9 manipulate the gestures that children produce when explaining a task and (using a dual-task paradigm) ask whether children expend less effort when gesturing while speaking that when not gesturing. To explore the effect that observing gesture has on working memory, Studies 10-12 manipulate the gestures that children see during someone else's explanation and (again using a dual-task paradigm) ask whether children expend less effort processing explanations that contain gesture than processing explanations that do not contain gesture. To achieve these two aims, children ages 6 to 10 years will participate in a math or conservation problem-solving task and their spoken and gestured responses will be videotaped and later analyzed. Gesture may prove to be a particularly effective tool to use in instructing or assessing children whose language is developing normally, as well as those who have difficulties producing and comprehending speech. [unreadable] [unreadable]

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): When children talk, they gesture and these gestures serve as an index of the child's readiness-to-learn. Work during the current grant period has shown that gesture does more than reflect thought--it plays a role in changing thought and, as a result, contributes to the learning process itself. The purpose of the proposed research is to explore the mechanism underlying this effect--specifically, whether gesture's impact on learning stems, at least in part, from its grounding in action and, if so, whether educators can capitalize on gesture's closeness to action to promote learning. The research has four aims. (1) To explore whether gesture and action work equally well to promote learning, Studies 1-4 manipulate whether children experience action (e.g., rotating an object) or gesture for that action (e.g., gesturing rotate) during training, and observe the effect of that manipulation on learning. (2) To explore whether gesture's closeness to action affects how well it promotes learning, Studies 5-8 manipulate whether children experience concrete gesture (e.g., rotate with the hand shaped as though it were actually moving the object) vs. abstract gesture (e.g., rotate with a pointing handshape) during training, and observe the effect of that manipulation on learning. (3) To explore whether concrete gesture serves as a stepping-stone to abstract thinking, Studies 9-12 manipulate the order in which children experience concrete and abstract gestures, and observe the effect of the manipulation on learning. (4) To explore whether gesture can hinder as well as help learning, Studies 13-16 provide children with gestures containing action features that are incompatible with the task, and observe the effect of incompatible gestures on learning. It is likely that the degree to which gesture resembles action has a larger or smaller effect on learning depending on the concreteness of the task to be learned. As a result, each series of studies uses two types of tasks--a task involving mental manipulation of concrete objects (mental rotation of parts of an object) and a task involving mental manipulation of symbolic objects (mathematical equivalence). In addition, because of the tight link between perceiving an action and performing the action, each series of studies varies whether the child produces gesture or action, or watches an experimenter produce gesture or action. Gesture is often used by children with impairments in language learning to compensate for their disabilities. Understanding the mechanism by which gesture promotes learning may be beneficial in both classroom and one-on-one tutorial situations, particularly in situations where acting directly on objects is not practical. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The gestures that children produce when they talk not only reflect what they know, they can also change what children know and, in this way, play a role in the learning process. The proposed research explores whether gesture's impact on learning stems from its grounding in action and, if so, whether educators can capitalize on gesture's closeness to action to promote learning. Since children who have impairments in language often use gesture to compensate for their disabilities, emphasizing gesture may be particularly beneficial for children with special needs in both classrooms and one-on-one tutorial or assessment situations where it may not be practical for children to act.

The Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC) was established in the fall of 2006 as one of three second-cohort Science of Learning Centers. SILC's purpose is to develop the new science of spatial learning and to use this knowledge to transform STEM educational practice. Spatial learning is the acquisition of spatial knowledge and skills, and the use of spatial knowledge and skills to facilitate learning in both spatial and non-spatial domains. It provides the foundation for a wide range of reasoning skills in STEM-based activities, from solving mathematical problems to engineering new products to understanding graphical depictions of complex systems. Previous research shows that spatial skills are a strong predictor of entry into STEM disciplines in college and into STEM careers, that substantial improvement of spatial learning is possible, and that this improvement matters to STEM success. SILC has brought together researchers from multiple lines of work on spatial cognition and education and from a variety of traditional disciplines (e. g., cognitive science, psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, education, STEM disciplines), integrating them to achieve new insights. SILC researchers are developing a set of powerful tools for spatial learning, honing them into effective, deployable educational techniques and practices for STEM learning, including advanced technology (e.g., intelligent educational software), effective curriculum units (e.g., in elementary school mathematics), engaging activities (e.g., in children's museums), and spatial assessment instruments (e.g., testing children's spatial skills, testing adults' STEM-relevant spatial skills). Several of the insights, tools and products from SILC's initial funding period already hold transformational potential for spatial learning. Research and translational activities in the second and last funding period, from 2011-2016, will continue the investment in the science of spatial learning, in order to allow the fulfillment of this promise.

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Diane Brentari will conduct five years of linguistic research on the handshapes used in well-established sign languages and in the invented systems used by deaf individuals who have not been exposed to a signed or spoken languages, called 'homesign' systems. Three different deaf populations that use a visual-gestural system as their primary means of communication will be studied: native signers of Italian Sign Language (adults and children); Italian homesigning children, and Nicaraguan homesigners(adults and children). The populations are all from environments where gesture is also a strong part of the language environment. The data will come from descriptions of events of motion and location.

The scientific questions addressed by this project are the following. First, how do grammatical properties in syntax, phonology, and morphology emerge in the case of children acquiring a language from their parents vs. when children are inventing their own systems of gestures without language input from their families? Second, what aspects of grammar are more or less robust in the case of acquisition case vs. the case of invention and at what age? Third, do homesign systems become more sophisticated when they are used as the primary means of communication over the course of a lifetime, as is the case in homesigning adults in Nicaragua? Finally, this research will contribute to our understanding of the evolution of language because homesigners are inventing communication anew in a way that is not possible to observe in the realm of spoken languages; this particlar moment of spoken language history was not recorded in a way that it can be studied with contemporary means. In addition to its scientific merit, this project will recruit native-signing Deaf undergraduate and graduate students to help analyze data, and so provide an opportunity for these students to engage in first-hand scientific research on sign languages.

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): What might it mean to say that language is innate or, alternatively, that language must be learned? This proposal attempts to articulate the question in terms that lend themselves to experimental investigation, asking which aspects of language development are so over-determined that they will appear even under learning conditions that vary widely from the norm. The participants are deaf children whose hearing parents have not yet exposed them to sign language, and whose hearing losses are so profound as to preclude acquisition of spoken language. Despite their lack of an accessible conventional language model, deaf children in the U.S., China, Turkey and Spain develop gesture systems that are structured in language-like ways. Where do these structured gesture systems come from? One candidate is the gestures hearing adults produce as they talk. But the gestures that hearing speakers produce as they communicate with their children lack language-like properties. Only when hearing speakers are asked to produce gesture without speech do their gestures take on language-like structure. The deaf children in previous studies were being educated orally and their hearing parents always produced gestures along with speech. Recent observations of hearing parents of deaf children in Nicaragua have revealed that these hearing parents often produce gestures without speech when communicating with their deaf children. Will this gestural input, which is likely to be language-like in structure, lead deaf children to construct a more linguistically sophisticated gesture system? Comparing Nicaragua to the other four cultures offers a unique opportunity to examine whether and how the gestures of hearing speakers influence the gesture systems developed by deaf children. The proposed project has 4 aims: (1) To characterize the gestures hearing adults produce with speech and without it in Nicaragua where deaf children are likely to receive gesture-without-speech as input to their gesture systems, and in Spain, Turkey, China, and the U.S. where deaf children primarily receive gesture- with-speech as input; (2) To determine whether gesture systems created by Nicaraguan deaf children are more complex than gesture systems created by Spanish, Turkish, Chinese and American deaf children; (3) To determine whether, in each of these cultures, hearing children, who interpret the gestures hearing speakers produce in the context of speech, use gestures differently from deaf children, who must interpret these same gestures without access to speech; (4) To explore a potential cognitive basis for the structure found in the deaf children's and hearing adults' gestures without speech, using a recently developed technique. In addition to their theoretical importance, the results will have practical significance. Informed of the capacities children themselves bring to language-learning, educators may be better able to help deaf children or hearing children with language disabilities learn a conventional language, be it signed or spoken. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]

From the very earliest stages of language learning, children gesture as they talk. In adults, gesture is integrated with the speech it accompanies, often conveying information that is related, but not identical, to the information conveyed in that speech. Gesture can thus expand a speaker's communicative range. Project II builds on previously collected longitudinal obervations of 60 children, ages 14 months to school entry, whose families were chosen to represent the demographic range of Chicago. The project observes gesture in these children who will be followed as they enter school until age 10. In addition to providing normative gesture data for the brain injured children in Project III, Project II has three specific aims. (1) Given that gesture can serve as a window that is distinct from speech into the child's communicative abilities during the early stages of language-learning, the first aim is to characterize the way gesture is used in later stages of language-learning as children begin school. Study 1 asks whether gesture continues to expand the children's communicative repertoires in the later years, providing the first sign of more complex syntactic constructions and new discourse devices. (2) Given individual differences in how children use gesture during the early stages of language-learning, the second aim is to explore whether those differences predict later language use. Study 2 asks whether gesture not only opens the door for languagelearning but also sets the learning trajectory. (3) The third aim is to explore whether gesture plays a causal role in language-learning. Study 3 experimentally manipulates gesture in 144 additional 1-word speakers and observes the effect of this manipulation on their vocabulary and their transition to 2-word speech. While most children successfully acquire the language to which they are exposed, some achieve mastery later than others. The timing of each milestone may be important for its effect on the eventual outcome of language acquisition, as well as for its impact on other cognitive skills. Project II explores whether gesturing also varies, and, if so, how that variability is related to variability in later languagelearning. Given that there are individual differences in how often families use gesture, it becomes important to determine whether gesture plays a role in language-learning. If so, educators need to become aware of the skills children display in the nonverbal realm, and learn to use them to improve verbal skills.

Objective. Core B has three goals: to recruit participants for each of the four projects;to collect data for each of the four projects;and to transcribe the speech and gesture data gathered in Projects I, II and III.

Objectives. The objectives of the Administrative Core are two-fold: (1) to provide coordination, logistical support, and financial accounting for all Cores and Research Projects;(2) to foster interactive activities and integrative research.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Deaf children whose hearing losses prevent them from accessing spoken language and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign language are effectively deprived of input from a conventional language. Despite their lack of linguistic input, these children develop gesture systems, called homesigns that have many of the properties of natural language. The fact that children can develop certain linguistic properties under relatively impoverished language learning circumstances provides strong evidence for the resilience of these properties. But homesign does not exhibit all of the properties of natural language. The goal of the proposed research is to explore the conditions under which homesign becomes a full-blown language. Deaf children rarely remain homesigners in the US;they either learn a conventional sign language or receive cochlear implants and focus on spoken language. In Nicaragua not only do some homesigners continue to use their gesture systems into adulthood, but 30 years ago large numbers of homesigning children were brought together for the first time and Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) was born. NSL has continued to develop as new waves of children enter the community and learn to sign from older peers. The first generation, taken together with subsequent generations and current day homesigners (child and adult), thus provides a living historical record of an emerging language. Although generations of signers and adult homesigners have been studied in Nicaragua, and child homesigners have been studied in other cultures, no one has studied the same linguistic properties across all of these groups, thus limiting the field's ability to determine how each of these varying circumstances contributes to the growth of a linguistic property. The proposed research will chart changes in 3 central aspects of sentence structure (verb structure, argument-specification, and sentence-modulation) across these populations and has 5 aims: (1) To probe the structures child Nicaraguan homesigners use for these 3 functions, and thus explore the contribution children make to linguistic structure. (2) To probe the structures that adult Nicaraguan homesigners use for the 3 functions, and thus explore the impact that cognitive and social maturity has on emerging linguistic structure. (3) To probe the structures that the first cohort of NSL use for the 3 functions, and thus explore the impact that being a receiver, as well as a producer, of a sign system has on the structure of that system. (4) To probe the structures that subsequent cohorts of NSL use for the 3 functions, and thus explore the role that transmission across generations plays in structuring a linguistic system. (5) To probe how hearing speakers in Nicaragua use gesture, with speech and without it, when describing the same situations;gesture may provide the raw materials out of which the deaf individuals in Studies 1-4 forge their sign systems. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The proposed research is designed to identify the capacities that children bring with them to language learning, thereby enabling educators to better help deaf children and hearing children with language disabilities learn a conventional language, be it signed or spoken.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Acquiring the ability to communicate using natural language and symbolic gestures is a uniquely human capacity that underlies the exchange of information among people. There is as yet no consensus concerning how susceptible this process is to environmental and biological variation. The proposed Program Project focuses on this issue, exploring the extent and the limits of the language-learning process. To examine language growth in the face of environmental variation (Project I), 60 children, selected to represent the demographic range of the Chicago area, were observed between the ages of 14 and 58 mos. and will continue to be followed as they enter school and learn to read. Assessments will be made of child spontaneous speech, along with narrative and reading skills from 5 to 10 years. Using these data, growth curves will be constructed for each child to track language and reading development across time, and to examine children's linguistic and reading progress in the later years (5-10 yrs.) in relation to their developmental trajectory during the early years (14-58 mos.). To explore language growth in the face of biological variation (Project III), 40 children with unilateral brain injury who were observed from 14 to 58 mos. will be followed from 5 to 10 years with an eye toward determining whether environmental variation plays the same role in predicting their language and reading growth as it does in children who have not suffered brain injury. Along with traditional measures, two additional probes will be used. (1) Gesture will be examined in children from Projects l-lll to determine whether children who are delayed in speech relative to their peers use gesture to compensate for those delays (Project II). (2) The brain bases underlying linguistic and gestural competence will be assessed in children from Projects l-lll using fMRI techniques (Project IV). Three cores will provide broad support to the projects: the Administrative Core A, the Data Collection and Transcription Core B, and the Statistical Core C. The proposed work builds on five years of longitudinal data in a diverse sample, and thus offers a unique opportunity to explore the impact that early language learning has on the oral and written skills that children develop once schooling has begun. The data have the potential to shed light on the factors that contribute to the gap between children from high vs. low socioeconomic groups on the first day of school, and may even point to ways of shrinking that gap.

The objectives of the Administrative Core are two-fold; (1) to provide coordination, logistical support, and financial accounting for all Cores and Research Projects; (2) to foster interactive activities and integrative research. The program director of the project, Susan Goldin-Meadow, will serve a core leader for Core A, and will make decisions about the use of Core services with the input of the Steering Committee, composed of the five Project and Core Leaders: Susan Goldin-Meadow (Project I; Core A), Susan Levine ( Project II), Steven Small (Project III), Stephen Raudenbush (Core C), Lindsey Richland (Core B). To achieve its first goal. Core A provides the other Cores and Research Projects with the following services; 1) managing recruitment, hiring, and review process for full-time staff; 2) procuring services, supplies, and equipment; 3) preparing progress and fiscal reports; 4) paying participants in all projects; 5) maintaining IRB approvals; 6) preserving copies of records and datasets. By providing these services to each of the three research projects and the two cores. Core A prevents duplication of effort within each of the separate projects. To achieve its second goal of fostering integrative research. Core A is responsible for arranging meetings among the Program Project personnel, with invited speakers, and with the Scientific Advisory Committee. To encourage interaction, four levels of meetings will be held: 1) two meetings of the Scientific Advisory Committee; 2) monthly meetings of the Steering Committee; 3) monthly seminar and speaker series; and 4) semi-monthly joint lab meetings. The quality of the implementation of Core A services is monitored by the Project and Core Leaders, as well as by University of Chicago protocols for purchasing goods and services; protocols for post-award accounting and reporting; protocols for recruiting and hiring staff; and protocols for insuring the protection of human subjects in research. RELEVANCE (See instructions): Core A provides administrative support for the entire program project, which is designed to explore the impact of environmental and biological variation on how children learn to use their language for higher order thinking, a key cognitive underpinning of academic and 21^' century career success.

In order to succeed in school, not only do children need good linguistic skills, but they also need to know how to use those skills to link ideas to one another-to make inferences, draw comparisons and analogies, construct hierarchies and partonomies, enlist schemas and definitions-in other words, they need to know how to use their language for higher order thinking. Higher order thinking has been identified as core to children's ability to become adaptive, innovative, and academically successful thinkers. Project 1 asks whether children vary in how they use talk for higher order thinking prior to school and, if so, whether this variability (1) predicts their higher order thinking later in development, and (2) is predicted by their parents' use of talk to illustrate and elicit higher order thinking eariier in development. The project builds on previously collected longitudinal observations of 60 children, ages 14 months to 9 years, whose families were chosen to represent the demographic range of Chicago. The parents in these homes have been shown to provide their children with widely varying amounts and types of linguistic input. The children will be followed until age 14 and, as they enter eariy adolescence, data will be collected on how they use language for higher order thinking in problem solving tasks and on standardized tests. Project I has three specific aims. (1) Study 1 describes changes in how children use connected discourse for higher order thinking from the eariiest stages of language learning (14 months) through early adolescence (14 years). (2) Study 2 explores how often parents use their talk to display and to elicit higher order thinking from their children in the early years (14-58 months) and later in development (10 years) when higher order thinking becomes particularly important for success in school. (3) Study 3 develops a model of cumulative parent input to higher order thinking that can be used to predict children's subsequent skills in higher order thinking. In addition. Project I will provide normative data for children with brain injury in Project II. The richness of the longitudinal data on which this project is based provides a detailed picture of the eariy talk children hear at home that could foster higher order thinking. RELEVANCE (See instructions): The goal of this project is to identify early parent behaviors that foster child higher order thinking. If these behaviors can be isolated, parents and preschool teachers can then be encouraged to use them when interacting with their children. The behaviors can also provide a basis for designing materials and interventions to promote higher order thinking, a skill that becomes more and more important as children progress through school.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Learning to communicate using natural language is a uniquely human capacity that underlies the exchange of information among people. There is as yet no consensus concerning how susceptible this process is to environmental and biological variation. The proposed Program Project addresses this issue, with a focus on how language is used for higher order thinking, a key cognitive underpinning of academic and 21st century career success. To examine the impact of environmental variation on language used for higher order thinking (Project I), 60 children, who were selected to represent the demographic range of the Chicago area and had been observed between 14 months and 10 years during the previous grant periods, will be followed until 15 years as they enter early adolescence. To explore continuity over development, higher order thinking will be coded in videotapes of spontaneous parent-child conversations early in development, and in tasks designed to elicit higher order thinking that parents conduct with their children at ages 10, 12, and 14 years. Standardized assessments of higher order thinking will also be collected. Using these data, models of cumulative parent input to higher order thinking from 14 months to 10 years will be constructed and used to predict children's subsequent skills in higher order thinking. To explore relations between language and higher order thinking in the face of biological variation (Project II), 40 children with unilateral brain injury, who had been observed from 14 months and will now be followed from 11 to 15 years, will be studied to determine how environmental input and biological aspects of their lesions combine to predict their use of language for higher order thinking, and whether input plays a similar role in this group as it does for children who have not suffered brain injury. In addition, the brain bases underlying language used for higher order thinking will be assessed in children from Projects I and II using fMRI techniques (Project III). Three cores will provide broad support to the projects: Administrative Core A, Data Collection and Transcription Core B, and Statistical Core C. The proposed work builds on and extends 10 years of longitudinal data in a diverse sample of typically developing children and children with brain injury, and thus offers a unique opportunity not only to explore the impact of early parental input on the development on higher order thinking, but also to examine how that input interacts with early brain injury.

When people talk, they gesture. Gesturing helps speakers to organize their thoughts and words, and also helps listeners to more fully understand the information being conveyed. Instructional techniques have begun to incorporate use of speech-accompanying gestures to facilitate learning. However, it is unclear how and why gestures aid learning. The goal of this research is to investigate whether, and if so how, observing gestures differs from observing actions performed on objects in facilitating young children's word learning. The research employs both behavioral measures of learning and brain imaging techniques to address this issue. The research will ultimately help to optimize learning environments.

This project addresses the hypothesis that gesture's facilitative effect on learning is distinct from effects of observing actions because gestures are more abstract forms of representation, in that they highlight the important components of an action without being tied to a specific learning context. The project explores the ways in which gestures versus actions facilitate word learning in 4 to 5 year old children. The research goals include (1) comparing the impact that learning a word through gesture, compared to action, has on the word's learning trajectory; (2) evaluating how well words are generalized and retained over time after they are learned through gesture or action; (3) exploring the neural mechanisms underlying each of these types of learning experiences. The results will clarify whether and how gesture promotes learning that goes beyond the particular, and extends over time.

This Science of Learning Collaborative Network brings together researchers and practitioners at the University of Chicago and Northeastern Illinois University to investigate the impact of nonverbal cues on math learning, and to develop online math lessons accessible to diverse learners based on this research-based evidence. Online education offers the promise that it can serve as an "equity lever" by making education accessible to all children, including low-income and disadvantaged children. But it is not clear that online teaching is as effective as face-to-face teaching, in part because it eliminates many of the nonverbal cues, including gesture, that have been found to promote learning. This network will conduct basic research exploring the impact that nonverbal cues have on math learning in both deaf and hearing children, and then use this research to develop online instruction that makes effective use of nonverbal cues for diverse learners. Deaf scientists are underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields, suggesting a pipeline problem for deaf students and highlighting a need to improve math teaching for these students. The studies will also consider the socioeconomic levels of the homes from which the students come, and thus have relevance not only to learners who come to school from privileged backgrounds, but also to learners who have access to fewer resources.

This Science of Learning Collaborative Network consists of collaborators representing ten universities from psychology, linguistics, computer science, and neuroscience with three types of expertise: scientists who study gesture and its role in learning math and science; scientists who study language development from a linguistic perspective; and scientists who are at the intersection of basic and applied research, and are involved in educational practice or policy and technology development. The purpose of the network is three-fold: (1) To advance knowledge of the impact that nonverbal cues have on mathematics instruction. (2) To explore whether nonverbal cues have different effects on different learners, in particular hearing vs. deaf learners from low vs. high SES homes. (3) To translate research into practice by developing an online teaching tool that is accessible to learners with diverse backgrounds. The proposed studies involve presenting lessons on mathematical equivalence and fraction magnitudes in different input mediums to different groups of learners. The studies include quantitative measures of behavioral and neurological learning outcomes. The research findings will be used to inform the development of online math lessons that can be adapted to the needs of different types of learners.

The award is from the Science of Learning-Collaborative Networks (SL-CN) Program, with funding from the SBE Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences (BCS), the SBE Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (SMA), the EHR Core Research (ECR) Program, and the CISE Division of Computer and Network Systems (CNS).

Students who succeed in algebra are more likely to be successful in advanced STEM courses. Students who fail algebra are more likely to drop out of high school. A team of researchers at the University of Chicago and Loyola University Chicago will conduct a set of experimental studies to explore how gesture and use of manipulatives may improve understanding of mathematical equivalence. a fundamental, pre-algebraic building block. Young children often have misconceptions about this concept??they can correctly solve problems like 3+4+5=___ , but when faced with a problem like 3+4+5=___+5, they add all of the numbers together, or just add the numbers to the left of the equal sign. This misconception often leads to difficulties with algebra. The researchers will test how two forms of movement that students and teachers already use in a classroom setting can be used to improve learning outcomes: actions, performed directly on objects, and gestures, movements of the hands that can communicate ideas along with speech. Previous work shows that both action and gesture have powerful effects on how children think and learn. Through a series of studies, the research team will explore (1) how children learn, generalize, and retain an understanding of mathematical equivalence after learning through action or gesture, (2) how spoken instruction can be used with action and gesture to affect learning outcomes, and (3) how action and gesture can be combined in instruction to bolster learning. To motivate future work and refine educational practices, behavioral methods and neuroimaging techniques will be used to understand how action and gesture produce their effects. By considering how the brain changes over the course of learning, it will be possible to gain a clearer understanding of the aspects of gesture and action that should be emphasized in the creation of teaching tools. The project is funded by the EHR Core Research program, which supports fundamental research that advances the research literature on STEM learning.

The overarching goal of the research is to investigate how action and gesture instruction affect children?s ability to learn, generalize, and retain information relevant to developing the pre-algebraic concept of mathematical equivalence. Action and gesture are both powerful tools that can shape cognition. However, these tools may promote learning in different ways and thus may be beneficial at different stages of the learning process. The supported projects explore this hypothesis, and have 3 specific goals: (1) To determine how action and gesture can best be used not only to promote initial learning of mathematical equivalence, but also to promote generalization and retention of the newly learned concept. The effects of action and gesture training will be considered on both a behavioral and neural level. Behavioral data will indicate general outcomes; neuroimaging methods will be used to differentiate between various mechanisms that could underlie the behavioral effects. Combining these methods will lead to the development of evidence-based educational techniques that target learning through action and gesture. (2) To determine how action and gesture interact with spoken instruction to promote learning, generalization, and retention of mathematical equivalence. Spoken instruction is the most common instructional method used by teachers, and prior work suggests that gesture is more tightly integrated with speech than action. Understanding how speech interacts with gesture and action to promote learning thus has the potential to increase the utility of each of these teaching tools. (3) To determine how gesture and action can be combined to promote learning, generalization and retention of mathematical equivalence. Action may be a useful way to introduce a concept; gesture may encourage children to generalize the concept. This issue takes on importance because of the frequency with which actions on manipulatives are used in classrooms; although good at introducing learners to a concept, manipulatives may have an important downside: They may inhibit generalization to new problems. These goals will be addressed through research with 9-10 year old children in a series of between-group studies.

Disentangling contributions to language structure that are driven by learners from contributions that are driven by the way language is used is difficult in typical language-learning circumstances. This research program turns to individuals in an unusual language-learning situation--deaf individuals who are developing a manual communication system in the absence of input from a conventional language--to address this question, and then complements the fieldwork with an experimental study in the lab. The goal of the project is to assess the degree to which linguistic structures can develop in a manual communication system when it is--and is not--shared with others. In addition to its theoretical importance in exploring properties of language that are so resilient they need not be learned from a language model, the research program has practical significance. Informed of the capacities that children bring with them to language learning, educators may be better able to help deaf children or hearing children with language disabilities learn a conventional language, signed or spoken. Moreover, discovering how linguistic properties continue to grow and become structured in the lab studies has the potential to provide insight into conditions that promote the development of these properties in children with disabilities.

The specific aims of this project are to determine which linguistic features are resilient to the absence of linguistic input, which emerge only in the process of dyadic communication, and which emerge only via transmission to a new generation of learners. Homesigners are deaf individuals whose hearing losses prevent them from learning a spoken language, and whose hearing families have not exposed them to a conventional sign language. Despite their lack of input from a conventional language, homesigners communicate and use gestures that have many of the properties of natural language to do so.  In the first study, homesigners from Guatemala who do, or do not, regularly interact with other homesigners will be observed to determine the impact that sharing a communication system has on the emergence of linguistic structure. In the second study, hearing adults will be asked to describe scenes not by speaking, but by using their hands, in the laboratory under three conditions:  on their own; in collaboration with another gesturer; or after learning the gestures from another gesturer. This gesture-creation paradigm is designed to mirror the naturalistic situations in which homesigns are found:  homesigns created in an environment where there are no other homesigners; homesigns created by homesigners in the presence of other homesigners; and homesigns transmitted to a new generation of learners.

The sign languages used by Deaf communities around the world are still somewhat understudied when compared to their spoken language counterparts. This research will answer two related questions about sign language verbs. Specifically, we ask when and why signers use one verb (e.g., [she-puts-planes-in-a-row]) vs. two verbs (e.g., [she-puts] [planes-in-a-row]) to describe a particular event. This structure is commonly studied in spoken languages, sometimes expressed as serial verb constructions, but it has not been studied in sign languages. Project researchers will examine how signers produce this structure and also how they understand it.

In a series of studies, researchers will investigate whether certain language-specific differences about two-verb predicates in sign languages are attributable to typological class (rather than to random variation or historical relatedness). Data from three well-established, national sign languages that are unrelated to one another will be studied: American Sign Language, Hong Kong Sign Language, and Turkish Sign Language. Typology has been an important tool in predicting variation among spoken languages, and it is hypothesized to have the same explanatory power in signed languages. Project investigators will also examine how two-verb predicates emerge in sign languages and what factors are the first to trigger two-verb predicates in historical time. To address these issues, the research team will analyze data from homesigners (individuals who have not acquired a conventional language but develop their own gestural communication systems) and signers from Nicaragua. Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) is an emerging sign language that is roughly 40 years old. The results of these analyses will shed light on the "nature" vs. "nurture" question, since the specific factors that trigger two-verb predicates in homesigners (phonological, morphological, semantic) are more likely to be ubiquitous in human language, both spoken and signed. Although it is no longer possible to trace spoken languages back to their roots in this way, the emergence of sign language in homesign provides a window onto language creation, more broadly.

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.

At great effort and expense, and with the cooperation of hundreds of parents, teachers, and children, researchers have collected conversation transcripts to study topics like children's language development. The data most useful for science are longitudinal and naturalistic, such as data collected periodically over time in children's homes. Unfortunately, the longitudinal, naturalistic corpora most likely to advance knowledge may contain information that renders participants identifiable. For this reason, naturalistic corpora are rarely shared with other researchers, hindering science. Sharing requires careful redaction--the removal of potentially identifying information. Currently, naturalistic corpora are often too large for manual redaction, and current automated tools both miss critical redactions and over-redact important information. To enable such data to be shared, this project seeks to develop novel computational methods for redaction.

This project's aim is to develop initially automated, human-in-the-loop redaction of identifying information in unstructured text data. First, to better understand key challenges around what aspects of transcripts make participants identifiable, the researchers are conducting interviews with social and behavioral science researchers and members of ethics boards. From these insights, the researchers are developing novel models for predicting what language may need to be redacted and they are designing novel user interactions for leveraging human expertise in redaction decisions. The unique characteristics of conversation transcripts require modeling novel features of language, drawing from natural language processing, psychology, privacy engineering, and linguistics. Because automated methods lack human insights into conversational context for making complex redaction decisions, the researchers are designing user interfaces that summarize how marked language, or tokens, appear longitudinally in transcripts, enabling human coders to quickly make redaction decisions. As a case study, the researchers are applying these techniques to the Language Development Project, a longitudinal corpus of 100 diverse children's development of language. The project is also training students in multidisciplinary research across the computational and social sciences.

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.