Research Interests

Research Projects

1. Event Perception to Language Learning: Foundational Components in Events

Relational terms (e.g., verbs and prepositions) are the cornerstone of language development, bringing together two distinct fields: linguistic theory and infants’ event processing. To learn relational terms, infants initially perceive and conceptualize spatial components within events such as path and manner, and then uncover how their ambient language packages these spatial constructs. We propose that infants trade spaces as the language-general nonlinguistic constructs are gradually refined and tuned to the requirements of the particular native language.

Figure and Ground (w/ Kathy Hirsh-Pasek & Roberta M. Golinkoff)
In this research program, we ask whether preverbal English- and Japanese-reared infants discriminate and categorize figures and grounds in dynamic events. Given that Japanese has a fine-grained encoding of grounds in the verb meaning depending on the geometry of the ground (e.g., crossing a road that has a boundary is encoded differently than crossing a grassy field, which has no boundaries), do preverbal infants from different language environments have similar categorical perception of these grounds? What happens when infants are exposed to and learn their native language? We also tease apart the role of different perceptual, conceptual, and temporal factors in terms of conceptualizing these event components.

Path and Manner(w/ Sarah Roseberry, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, & Roberta M. Golinkoff)
Previous research suggests that infants discriminate and categorize path cand manner of motion events. Here, we ask the factors and linguistic definitions of path and manner to examine conceptualization of these event components. Manner is defined as intrinsic movement delimited by the properties of the object (e.g., only creatures with legs can run). Path is defined as the extrinsic movement of one object in relation to another (e.g., a boy jumping over a ball). These studies investigate whether infants’ categorization of paths is disrupted removing the reference object. Thus, in these studies we ask the necessary elements for “path” and “manner” relations.

2. Understanding and Expression of Causal Events

The ability to perceive, comprehend, and express causal relationships between objects and events is central to human cognition as understanding of causal relationships permeates nearly every aspect of event perception. Furthermore, the ability to comprehend the combinatory forces that are elements of causal relationships (i.e., temporal and spatial components) has direct implication for higher-level verbal and scientific capacities.

Spatial and temporal violations in causal events
(w/ Emily Tynan, Benjamin Straube, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Roberta M. Golinkoff, Anjan Chatterjee)
Causal events are inherently relational (i.e., focusing on the relation between two objects and events) and involve various components such as temporal and spatial aspects of an event. In a direct causal relationship, an object (A) moves and comes into contact with an inactive object (B); (A) then stops moving and object B starts to move, continuing the same trajectory along which object (A) had originally been traveling. In this study, we identify spatial-temporal parameters that influence infants’ perception of causality

Expression of cause in speech and gesture (w/ Kathy Hirsh-Pasek & Roberta M. Golinkoff)
This study addresses the role of gesture in revealing causal knowledge for physical causal events (e.g. a person intentionally pushed a ball with the stick to move it to the other side of the pool) that might not be yet expressed through speech. We tested English-speaking children aged 2.5- to 5 years. How do children’s gestures strengthen and supplement verbal information? What kind of gestures do children use to describe causal events?

Understanding of cause in terms of forces and vectors (w/ Kathy Hirsh-Pasek & Roberta M. Golinkoff)
Recent work by Wolff (2003, 2007) suggests that cause is understood with the direction of contact and forces that can alter the direction. Wolff’s model of Cause embeds subcategories such as Cause (e.g., the fan causes the boat to move), Enable (e.g., the fan helps the boat to reach the goal) and Prevent (e.g., the fan blocks the boat to reach the goal). This study asks whether children 1) interpret similar causal relations with respect to directions and forces, and 2) represent subcategories of cause. We also examine how children describe these subcategories of cause in gesture and speech.

3. The role of gesture on mental rotation

(w/ Shannon Fitzhugh, Thomas Shipley, Nora Newcombe, & Susan Goldin-Meadow)

Gestures reflect thought processes when people talk about spatial information, such as giving directions or describing motions, and reveal information about problem solving strategies (e.g., Chu & Kita, 2008; Hegarthy et al., 2005). In this study, we examine adults’ solution strategies for a mental rotation task. Three groups were tested: high ability (> 50% correct), low ability (< 50%) and non-rotators who have an item specific response pattern (Geiser et al, 2006). We analyze verbal reports, accompanying gestures, and eye movements to determine solution strategies.

4. Individual differences in spatial and language development

(w/ Sarah Roseberry, Frances Balcomb, Andrea Frick, Nora Newcombe, & Kathy Hirsh-Pasek)

Do individual differences in infant event perception predict later language development? In two lines of studies, we examine whether infants’ ability to categorize semantic event components relates to later language development and whether the predictive power is constrained to language specific tasks. Currently, we also investigate individual differences on toddlers’ ability to code place (place learning) and their future abilities on mental rotation, spatial language, and causal understanding.

5. Ellipsis

(w/ Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Roberta M. Golinkoff, & Tom Roeper)

Lexical and grammatical developments are highly correlated in the early phases of language learning. However, research does not directly focus on whether children learn nouns and verbs as grammatical categories. In this project, we used ellipsis as a window to understand preschool children’s interpretation of grammatical categories as nouns and verbs. We have examined preschool children's interpretation of elliptical sentences in three languages, English, Turkish, and German, to see how children infer meaning from the linguistic contextual cue to grammatical membership.

6. Comprehension of verbs and argument structure

(w/ Aylin Küntay & Letitia R. Naigles)

Compared to nouns, children learn the meaning and extension of verbs later. Syntactic bootstrapping argues that children use certain regularities between verb meaning and structure of the sentence to understand and narrow down the possible meanings of verbs (e.g., Gleitman, 1990). In this study, we investigated the application of syntactic bootstrapping in Turkish, which employs inflectional morphology to assign grammatical relations and allows argument ellipsis. We investigated whether Turkish speakers interpret constructions differently depending on the number of NPs in the sentence, the presence of accusative casemarking, and the presence of the verbal causative morpheme.