Projects 2008-2009

Chloe and Meg , with their helpers Ayumi and Brandon, worked on children’s understanding of their own and other people’s knowledge. Are these sentences different for children—and at what ages?

a. I heard John sing.
b. I heard that John sang.

Here, sentence (a) must mean that the event was witnessed directly, and (b) can be inferred through second-hand information. For example, (b) could be true if I only was told that John sang, but this cannot be the case for (a). We found that kindergarten and first-grade children are beginning to make distinctions between the meanings of sentences like (a) and (b), but the difference between (c) and (d) was a little harder.

c. Johnny is sure that he will win.
d. It is sure that Johnny will win.

Children ages 4 to 6 years did not use just their own perspective to interpret whether Johnny will win, but they did not always separate what Johnny thought from what the speaker thought, so they often interpreted sentence (c) with the same meaning as sentence (d).

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Misato and Maxi’ s projects looked at how children make sense of phrases that repeat themselves: the possessive of a possessive, or an agent-compound inside of an agent compound:

e. John's brother's car.
f. Cookie Monster’s sister’s picture

At the age of 3 to 5 years old Maxi found an adult-like understanding of complex possessive structures such as (e) and (f) a little more than half the time. However, they would often simplify them to "John's car," or to a compound reading, a picture of Cookie Monster and a picture of his sister, instead of just a picture of the sister.

g. Coffee-maker maker
h. Pencil-sharpener spiller

After each story Misato presented, the children were asked to choose one of the characters in the story for phrases like (g) and (h). Most children between 5 and 9 years old interpreted compound nouns differently from adults. For example, children usually chose a character that was “a pencil sharpener and spiller,'' namely, someone who sharpens and spills pencils instead of someone who spilled pencil sharpeners.

Acquisition of False Belief

Researcher: Helen Stickney

Helen is investigating the children's (ages 2-5) understanding of the ability of people to have a false belief. When a person has a belief that is different from the reality that a child witnesses, can she recognize the false belief? If so, or if not, how does she interpret false beliefs and misstatements? Does a child's ability to understand false belief correlate with the child's language ability?

The method used involves the child and a puppet looking at a series of pictures. The puppet will make silly statements about the pictures and the child is instructed to, playfully, tell the puppet when he gets the pictures right or wrong. For example, for a picture showing Elmo (with a thought bubble) thinking about a cat, the puppet might say, “Is Elmo thinking about a dog?” The child’s answers or gestures will be recorded.

Acquisition of Reflexive and Reciprocal Pronouns

Researcher: Danny Green

Danny is investigating children's comprehension of reflexive and reciprocal pronouns (each other, themselves) and whether certain verbs carry specific meanings that are interpreted regardless of the accompanying pronoun. Danny's project involves showing children a series of pages which each contain two similar photographs. Danny will describe one of the photos and ask the child to point to the corresponding photo. An example of the task at hand: one page contains a picture of two people embracing one another, and another picture of the same two people hugging themselves. Danny will then say, “Show me, they are hugging themselves.”

Research suggests that the meaning embedded in the verb “hugging” (two people hugging one another) is strong enough to override the pronoun “themselves” in a mind that is still strengthening its grasp on language.

You and Me--This and That

Researchers: Helen Stickney and Meg Grant

Meg & Helen participated in a larger study investigating children's acquisition of pronominal reference. They looked at children's understanding of words like "you"/"your", "me"/"my" and "this"/"that". They set up a game where Meg (or Helen) and the child had twin sets of small toys and action figures. Then they took turns doing actions with either the researchers' or the child’s toys, like pushing, pulling, moving, and spinning them. They would also take turns describing what they did with each toy. For example, "I pushed your car," "you moved my robot," and so on.

Children aged 3-5 had a clear understanding of switching personal pronouns (you and I) according to who was speaking, but had more trouble with "this" and "that"."

Box of Chocolates versus Box of John's Chocolates

Researcher: Helen Stickney

Helen has also been looking at how children comprehend complex phrases of a particular type. She told children stories while they looked at pictures, and then the children helped a puppet decide which picture matched a crucial phrase in the story. A number of her stories contrasted sentences that differed according to the placement of one key word.. For instance, if the child heard "a crinkly box of John's chocolates", he/she would help the puppet figure out whether the box or the chocolates were crinkly.

Children aged 3-6 performed as well as adults on this task."

All, most, and some

Researcher: Liz O'Connor

How much is “most”? Liz worked with children 3 ½ to 5 ½. She presented them with a set of three bears and sets of objects varying in number. The children were asked to give “all of the hats” or “most of the hats” to the bears. Other times, they were asked to give “some” or “most” of the hats (or balloons or apples) to them.

By age 5, they were generally giving more hats for “most” than “some,” but still hadn’t worked out the difference between “most” and “all.” They seemed to treat “most” as equaling “all.”

Who is "she"?

Researcher: Anna Verbuk

In one small experiment, Anna explored how children figure out the referent of expressions such as "he" and "she." For example, if one says "This is Jane. This is Mary. Mary washed her." "Her" can mean Jane but it cannot mean Mary.

She found that children learn restrictions of this kind around the age of 6, and that younger children have trouble knowing when “her” is ambiguous or not in these kids of structures.

Indirect Requests

Researcher: Anna Verbuk

Anna was studying how children figure out certain indirect inferences. For example, when someone says, "It's really hot here," the indirect meaning might be: "Could you turn on the air-conditioner."

Anna presented children ages 3 to 8 with about a dozen scenarios with different direct and indirect requests. She found that children were able to compute inferences of this kind around the age of 6-7, and that younger children have trouble with them.