Postdoctoral Fellowship: SPRF: Developing the Vocabulary of Space

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. John Trueswell at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Barbara Landau at Johns Hopkins University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist examining how children process the vocabulary that underlies spatial relations. Vocabulary acquisition is a fundamental component of early childhood development, and has far reaching implications, predicting cortical growth and academic achievement as children age. The research proposed here investigates how typically-developing children acquire an important aspect of their early vocabulary: terms denoting spatial relations (e.g. “on” or “in”). Understanding how children process the vocabulary underlying spatial relations will allow for targeted interventions for children who have difficulty understanding spatial vocabulary, such as children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) or similar language delays. We look at two fundamental distinctions: one between containment and support and one between sub-types of support: core support relations (such as support-from-below) and non-core ones (such as attachment-by-hanging). We ask how children come to learn the meaning of the lexical items underlying these distinctions in their native language(s). Specifically, we investigate whether children process this distinction rapidly, in real time (as adults do) by measuring whether subtle linguistic distinctions affect adults’ and children’s eye-movements to images depicting core and non-core relations. Furthermore, we investigate the source of children’s non-adultlike productions. We ask why children appear to describe complex spatial relations without the lexical verbs adults generally use (e.g. saying “The picture is on the wall” while adults more often say “The picture is hanging on the wall”). We hypothesize that children’s still-developing inhibitory control system is to blame for this difference, and test this directly in a conflict adaptation paradigm. This work will bring together two rich but disparate areas of study: work on spatial relations and work on the development of human sentence processing. Ultimately, the goal of this work is to fill a gap in knowledge the field has currently: how children process the language that encodes where things are in the world around them. 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.