Collaborative Research: Language-Specific Input, Cross-Cultural Differences and Spatial Cognition: A Case of 'Support' Relation

本研究的目标是了解婴幼儿语言和认知发展之间的关系。研究人员从语言发展的早期阶段就提出了语言和认知之间的双向互动。该项目将侧重于支持的空间关系领域(例如，将目标对象放在桌子上)。早在语言开始之前，婴儿就已经探索了支持关系的许多方面，但语言以显著不同的方式划分了这些关系。为了了解语言和认知之间的关系，研究人员建议揭示婴儿形成支持关系抽象类别(例如，水平支持与垂直支持、依恋支持)的非语言能力，以及这些能力在获得语言中空间词的意义时如何与他们听到的语言相互作用。研究人员采取了多语言、多方法的方法来研究这种相互作用。具体地说，他们考察了学习英语、韩语、德语或西班牙语的儿童中支持关系的非语言和语义类别的发展，这些语言群体在如何组织各自语言中的各种支持关系方面进行了有趣的对比。在考察环境输入对儿童空间认知的影响时，研究比较了(在四种语言组中)母亲在谈论对孩子的支持事件(将x放在y上)时的语言和手势方面。为了达到这一目标，研究人员将对每种语言进行一项纵向研究，从10个月(孩子的年龄)开始，跟踪亲子在自然环境(即孩子的家)中的互动，时间为一年半。还计划进行一项横断面的启发式研究，以比较父母谈话中的跨文化差异。为了了解婴幼儿如何组织和归类各种类型的支持关系，研究人员还将进行实验研究，系统地调查婴幼儿空间类别组织的发展。通过考察几个年龄组从言语前到儿童早期(从10到27个月大)，这些研究将记录婴儿时期形成的非语言支持类别可能如何受到其语言中支持空间术语的习得的影响。为了更好地评估婴儿的能力与他们的环境之间的相互作用，调查以一种综合的方式结合了几种方法，包括自然主义方法、纵向方法、横断面启发法和实验横断面方法。这两个共同的PI在学习英语和韩语的儿童的空间认知和空间语言发展方面得出了跨文化的发现，这有助于最近对语言和认知之间早期关系的重新思考。在拟议的项目中，他们通过探讨父母的投入在空间认知发展中的作用，并通过准确地将推动婴儿支持分类的语言元素归类到特定语言的语义范畴，为他们的调查增加了一个新的维度。总体而言，这项研究将有助于更准确地理解儿童早期语言和认知之间相互作用的本质。这一项目的研究人员之间的国际合作为研究问题提供了一种独特的方法，并为研究人员和他们的学生提供了广泛的培训机会。由于该项目的跨语言性质，他们计划招募和培训来自代表人数不足的少数群体的学生，以协助该项目的各个方面。该项目的结果还将为发展研究中代表性不足的婴儿和幼儿提供亟需的数据。结果将在学术(包括国际媒体)和非学术环境中(通过研讨会和向教师、家长和日托工作人员的演示)广泛传播。

The goal of the present proposal is to understand the relation between language and cognitive development in infants and toddlers . The researchers propose a two-way interaction between language and cognition from a very early stage in development. This project will focus on the domain of the spatial relation of support (e.g., placing a target object on a table). Infants already explore many aspects of support relations well before language begins and yet languages divide up these relations in significantly different ways. To understand the relation between language and cognition, the researchers propose to uncover infants' nonverbal abilities to form abstract categories of support relations (e.g., horizontal vs. vertical support, support by attachment), and how such abilities interact with the language they hear in acquiring the meaning of the spatial words in their language. The researchers take a multi-language and multi-method approach to investigate this interaction. Specifically, they examine the development of nonlinguistic and semantic categories of support relations in children learning English, Korean, German, or Spanish, language groups that contrast interestingly in how they organize various support relations in their language. In examining the effect of environmental inputs on children's spatial cognition, the studies compare (across the four language groups) linguistic and gestural aspects of maternal speech when they talk about support events (putting x on y) to their children. For this goal, for each language, the researchers will conduct a longitudinal study following parent-child interactions in a naturalistic setting (i.e., the child's home) starting from 10 months (child's age) for a year and half will also be conducted. A cross-sectional, elicitation study to compare cross-cultural differences in parental talking is also planned. To understand how infants and toddlers organize and categorize various types of support relations, the researchers also will conduct experimental studies to systematically investigate the development in infants' organization of spatial categories. By examining several age groups from the preverbal period to early childhood (from 10 to 27 months of age), the studies will document how the nonlinguistic categories of support formed in infancy may be influenced by the acquisition of the spatial terms of support in their language. To best assess the interaction between infants' abilities and their environment, the investigation combines several methodologies in an integrative way, including naturalistic, longitudinal methods, cross-sectional elicitations methods, and experimental cross-sectional approaches. The two co-PIs have yielded cross-cultural findings on the development of spatial cognition and spatial language in English- and Korean-learning children that have contributed to a recent rethinking of the early relationship between language and cognition. In the proposed project, they add a new dimension to their investigation by addressing the role of parents' input in the development of spatial cognition and by pinpointing the linguistic elements that drive infants' categorization of support into the language-specific semantic categories. Overall, the proposed study will contribute to understanding more precisely the nature of the interaction between language and cognition in early childhood.The international collaboration among the researchers in this project lends a unique methodological approach to the research questions and provides a wide range of training opportunities for the researchers and their students. Because of the cross-linguistic nature of the project, they plan to recruit and train students from underrepresented minorities to assist with various aspects of the project. The results from the project also will contribute much needed data from infants and toddlers underrepresented in developmental research. The results will be disseminated broadly, in academic (including international outlets) and non-academic settings (via workshops and presentations to teachers, parents, and daycare workers).