ResearchOverview of our Research At the Cornell Infant Studies Lab, we are mainly interested in infant cognitive and language development. We study young children ranging in age from 6 months to 30 months. Specifically, our studies examine how infant form spatial categories such as containment and support and we are interested in how language influences the formation of these spatial categories.Our second major line of research includes early word learning and bilingualism. We are specifically interested in the socio-pragmatic and linguistic processes by which children, who are exposed to multiple languages from early on, learn their first words.Students in the lab have also examined a range of issues such as early understanding of grammatical categories such as function words and infant object categorization. Summaries of Specific Projects Infant Categorization of Spatial Relationships Infant Categorization of Spatial Relationships: In a series of studies, we examined infants' ability to form a spatial category of containment (i.e., "in"), support (i.e., "on") and tight-fit relationships (i.e., "kkita," a Korean spatial morpheme used to describe any spatial relationship with a tight-fit between objects). Participants in this study were 9- to 11- month-old and 17-to 19-month old infants from English-speaking families. English -learning infants at both ages showed evidence of being able to form an abstract category of containment (i.e."in"). That is, when infants are first repeatedly shown video-taped events of toy objects being placed "in" other objects until they show signs of habituating to these events- in other words, they show signs of being bored with these events. Then, infants are presented with events that depict some new toy objects being placed "in" objects, or events that depict the original toys and some new toys being placed "on" other objects. Based on measures of infants' looking times to these events, we could infer that infants were able to recognize containment relationships as familiar and could discriminate this relationship from a different spatial relationship (i.e., support), even when the objects depicting the relationship were novel. In contrast, 9-to-11-month old infants provided no evidence that they were able to form abstract categories of support or tight-fit relationships. At the same time, 17-to 19-month-old were able to discriminate the support and tight-fit relationships from a different relationship, although they did so only when the objects depicting the relationship were familiar. When the objects in the events were novel, infants provided no evidence that they could discriminate these relationships from a different spatial relationship between objects. Currently, we are testing Korean infants of 9 to 11 months and 17 to 19 months of age to explore the influence of linguistic environment on infants' ability to discriminate and form a spatial category of containment and tight-fit relationships. In particular, we are interested in whether these infants will be able to form a category of tight-fit relationships, a task that the English-speaking infants were unable to do. If Korean infants are successful in forming a category of tight-fit, then we will be able to provide evidence that an infants' linguistic environment influences their attention to and ability to process the spatial relationships between objects. The Role of Language in Infant Spatial Categorization: This study explored how infants recognize and learn the abstract category of support (i.e., “on”) and whether language facilitates the formation of this category. Eighteen-month-old infants first watched short video clips of objects being placed on other objects. The infants were placed in one of four conditions: one group of infants saw the videos with no sound; a second group of infants heard general phrases that encouraged them to watch but did not direct their attention towards a particular aspect of the video (e.g., “Look, see that?...Wow!”); a third group heard phrases that included the word “on” and drew attention to the support relation being depicted in the video(“Look it goes on!”); and a fourth group heard phrases that included a novel word instead of the word “on” (e.g. “Look, it goes toke!”). Following this initial phase, infants were presented with a series of new video clips that depicted objects being placed in objects as opposed to on the objects. The results revealed that only the infants in the group that heard the word “on” showed looking time patterns that indicated that they had indeed formed the spatial category of support (i.e. on). Furthermore in the absence of the specific linguistic cue of the word ‘on’, infants did not show evidence of forming this category. The results suggest that language plays an important role in 18-month-old infants’ ability to form the category of support. Infants' Ability to Form Novel Word-Spatial Relationship Associations: Most experimental studies of early word learning have focused on infants' ability to learn a novel word for an object. We asked whether infants can also easily learn to map a novel word onto a spatial relationship. Fourteen-month old infants watched multiple trials of a Big Bird Toy placed either "in "(containment relation) or "on" (support relation) a red block. Each short scene was paired with one of two novel words: “teek” and “blick” , one for each relation. Results revealed that infants at this age could indeed form an association between a spatial relation and a novel word.
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Cornell Infant Studies Laboratory
Cornell Infant Studies Laboratory |
