LINKING EARLY LINGUISTIC AND CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT

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DESCRIPTION: This application addresses fundamental issues of early conceptual development, language development and the relation between them. Children, like adults, are faced with an enormously rich environment. Each day, they encounter new objects and events. This diversity would be overwhelming if each object and event were treated as unique. Therefore, an essential developmental task is to form categories that capture commonalties across objects and naming -- across development and across languages. Particular types of words (e.g. count 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. Because most of the existing literature is devoted to English-speaking children who have already made significant linguistics advances, we have a very limited understanding of how they begin to build these important linkages early in development and how they are influenced by the language under acquisition. The current application focuses specifically on the two types of evidence that will address the transition from infancy through the preschool years. In Section II, the proposed studies sharpen the evidence for these linkages in children acquiring languages other than English. they will build upon Waxman's previous work in French and Spanish, broadening the empirical base to include children acquiring additional native languages (Italian and Swedish), and to include experimental methods. By combining developmental and cross-linguistic approaches, this research will 1) broaden 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 language and conceptual development, and 3) underscore the vital interaction between the expectations of the child and the shaping role of the environment. The results will have far-reaching implications for theories of early language and cognitive development. This basic research has begun to serve as a springboard for research on specific language impairments in children.