Early Linguistic and Conceptual Development

This series of studies addresses fundamental issues of early conceptual development, language development, and the relation between them.  Infants live in an enormously rich environment.  Each day, they encounter new objects and witness new events.  This richness would be overwhelming if each object or event was treated as unique.  Therefore, an essential developmental task is to form concepts to capture commonalities among their experiences and to learn words to express these.  Recent research reveals powerful and implicit links between conceptual and linguistic organization, across development and across languages.  Infants begin the task of word-learning with a broad initial expectation linking novel words to a broad range of commonalities.  This sets the stage for the evolution of more specific expectations, linking particular kinds of words (e.g., noun, adjective, verb) to particular kinds of relations (e.g., category-, property-, and motion-based commonalities).  These more specific expectations, which are shaped by the structure of the native language, do not emerge all of a piece.  Instead, infants first tease apart the nouns (from among the other grammatical forms) and map them specifically to object categories.  With this noun-category link in place, the other specific links for other grammatical forms will follow, and these will be sensitive to the correlations between the grammatical forms represented in the native language and their associated meanings.  

The overarching goal of the current studies is to concentrate on two types of evidence that will bring us closer to understanding the origins and evolutions of these links between language and conceptual development.  Both developmental and cross-linguistic evidence are essential in discovering the origin of infants' early expectations, identifying which might be universal, and specifying how these are shaped by experience with the native language under acquisition.  These results should have far-reaching implications for theories of acquisition.  This basic research may also serve as a springboard for assessing young children being raised in bilingual environments and those with specific language impairments.