The overarching goal of my research program is to elucidate how language influences developmental change. My research builds on well-documented predictive links between language abilities and other cognitive outcomes, and goes beyond prediction by developing and testing mechanistic hypotheses. I do so by (1) examining the co-development of language and other cognitive abilities over development, and (2) determining how children’s experiences shape their language development.
My work has shown that spoken linguistic input facilitates the detection and processing of the relevant sources of information in the world, in part by activating knowledge about referred-to objects. My research has also highlighted vocabulary structure as a key factor supporting these mechanisms, and has provided evidence for a mechanistic account of how vocabulary structure emerges as a result of children’s experiences.
By clarifying the mechanisms by which language influences cognitive development, my research has the potential to inform interventions for at-risk children and initiatives aiming to reduce achievement gaps in education.
Words and object detection
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I have shown that spoken words influence how children as young as three identify a visual target in clutter, facilitating its detection amid distractors (Vales & Smith, 2015, Dev. Sci.; Vales & Smith, 2018, JECP). While prior work has reported linguistic influences on cognitive abilities in young children, my research is the first to locate the effects of words at the level of object detection.
Learning in the real world requires continually selecting the relevant sources of information out of all the possible targets for attention. Thus, if words can momentarily help children detect and process the information that is most relevant in the moment, then the accrual of such individual learning moments could over time give rise to the documented long-term effects of language on other cognitive outcomes. |
Words and knowledge activation
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My research shows that spoken words activate knowledge about referred-to categories (Vales & Smith, in prep), and about items related to their referents (Vales & Fisher, 2019 Cognitive Science).
By bringing to mind knowledge about referred-to objects, such active knowledge may facilitate the processing and assimilation of new relevant information -- an hypothesis I am currently examining. By elucidating how children learn from language input – a ubiquitous source of new information in and outside of school – this work pinpoints a more specific target for intervention (e.g., vocabulary-building in specific domains). |
Beyond individual words: Vocabulary structure
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Building knowledge of word relations is critical for school readiness and success because it allows access to and use of stored knowledge about relations among entities in the world. While it is widely believed that such knowledge is acquired from experience, a mechanistic understanding of how vocabulary structure changes as a result of experience is still lacking.
I have shown that, over development, the initial aggregation of words into clusters of related items (such as ‘animals’, ‘foods’, or ‘clothes’) is followed by a more protracted splitting of words according to relevant within-cluster distinctions (such as ‘animals’ associated with summertime vs. not) (Vales, Stevens, & Fisher, 2020, JECP). This is consistent with a mechanism in which children exploit patterns of covariation among the features of the entities in the world, as children gradually learn about overlapping clusters of features (e.g., almost all animals – but not clothes – have eyes and breathe, but only some animals are more likely to be encountered in the summertime). These patterns of differentiation directly depend on children’s experiences (Vales, States, & Fisher, 2020, Child Development). Preschool children who completed a week-long enrichment program at a local botanical garden where they learned about the features of items in a specific domain (e.g., ‘insects’, bugs that have a 3-part body and antennae) more strongly differentiated between insects and other non-insect bugs (such as spider) at post-test, even when tested with items they did not experience during the program activities. Crucially, this change was restricted to the domain experienced – children who learned about bugs did not show similar changes in the domain of plants, and vice-versa. This work not only directly informs theories of vocabulary structure acquisition, but also suggests that academic achievement gaps reported in children from lower socio-economic backgrounds (who are less likely to have access to out-of-school enrichment opportunities) may be better understood as a lack of access to early opportunities that build initial knowledge in academic-relevant domains. A full account of the acquisition of semantic structure also requires understanding how children’s experiences give rise to changes in the structure of their vocabulary. I have shown that the degree to which children represent concepts as related is best accounted for by their degree of co-occurrence in a corpus of child-directed speech (Unger, Vales, & Fisher, 2020, Cognitive Science). This suggests that children’s vocabulary structure will come to represent the higher-order relations that are available in the input to which they are exposed. Currently, I am examining whether different theoretically-relevant measures of linguistic input can predict children’s semantic structure. |
Some of the amazing people with whom I collaborate(d):
Linda Smith, Indiana University
Anna Fisher, Carnegie Mellon University
Viridiana Benitez, Arizona State University
Rima Hanania, Indiana University
Caitlin Fausey, University of Oregon
Paulo Carvalho, Carnegie Mellon University
Layla Unger, Ohio State University
Patience Stevens, Carnegie Mellon University
Zach Branson, Carnegie Mellon University
Leila Wehbe, Carnegie Mellon University
Aria Wang, Carnegie Mellon University