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Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language. In other words, it is how human beings gain the ability to be aware of language, to understand it, and to produce and use words and sentences to communicate.
Eleanor Rosch is an American psychologist. She is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in cognitive psychology and primarily known for her work on categorization, in particular her prototype theory, which has profoundly influenced the field of cognitive psychology.
Vocabulary development is a process by which people acquire words. Babbling shifts towards meaningful speech as infants grow and produce their first words around the age of one year. In early word learning, infants build their vocabulary slowly. By the age of 18 months, infants can typically produce about 50 words and begin to make word combinations.
Dedre Dariel Gentner is an American cognitive and developmental psychologist. She is the Alice Gabriel Twight Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University, and a leading researcher in the study of analogical reasoning.
Linda B. Smith is an American developmental psychologist internationally recognized for her theoretical and empirical contributions to developmental psychology and cognitive science, proposing, through theoretical and empirical studies, a new way of understanding developmental processes. Smith's works are groundbreaking and illuminating for the field of perception, action, language, and categorization, showing the unique flexibility found in human behavior. She has shown how perception and action are ways of obtaining knowledge for cognitive development and word learning.
Elissa Lee Newport is a professor of neurology and director of the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery at Georgetown University. She specializes in language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics, focusing on the relationship between language development and language structure, and most recently on the effects of pediatric stroke on the organization and recovery of language.
Susan E. Carey is an American psychologist who is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. She studies language acquisition, children's development of concepts, conceptual changes over time, and the importance of executive functions. She has conducted experiments on infants, toddlers, adults, and non-human primates. Her books include Conceptual Change in Childhood (1985) and The Origin of Concepts (2009).
Susan A. Gelman is currently Heinz Werner Distinguished University Professor of psychology and linguistics and the director of the Conceptual Development Laboratory at the University of Michigan. Gelman studies language and concept development in young children. Gelman subscribes to the domain specificity view of cognition, which asserts that the mind is composed of specialized modules supervising specific functions in the human and other animals. Her book The Essential Child is an influential work on cognitive development.
Barbara Tversky is a professor emerita of psychology at Stanford University and a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Tversky specializes in cognitive psychology.
The concept of linguistic relativity concerns the relationship between language and thought, specifically whether language influences thought, and, if so, how. This question has led to research in multiple disciplines—including anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy. Among the most debated theories in this area of work is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. This theory states that the language a person speaks will affect the way that this person thinks. The theory varies between two main proposals: that language structure determines how individuals perceive the world and that language structure influences the world view of speakers of a given language but does not determine it.
Amanda Woodward is Dean of the Division of the Social Sciences and the William S. Gray Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. Her research investigates infant social cognition and early language development including the understanding of goal-directed actions, agency, theory of mind, and learning from social partners. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Word learning biases are certain biases or assumptions that allow children to quickly rule out unlikely alternatives in order to effectively process and learn word meanings. They begin to manifest themselves around 18 months, when children begin to rapidly expand their vocabulary. These biases are important for children with limited processing abilities if they are to be successful in word learning. The guiding lexical principles have been defined as implicit and explicit strategies towards language acquisition. When a child learns a new word they must decide whether the word refers to the whole object, part of the object, or the object's characteristics, solving an indeterminacy problem.
Mutual exclusivity is a word learning constraint that involves the tendency to assign one label/name, and in turn avoid assigning a second label, to a single object. Mutual exclusivity is often discussed as one of three main lexical constraints, or word learning biases, that are believed to play major roles in word learning, the other two being the whole-object and taxonomic constraints. This assumption is typically first seen in the early stages of word learning by toddlers, but it is not limited to young childhood. Mutual exclusivity is often discussed by domain-specific accounts of language as limiting children's hypotheses about the possible meanings of words. It is generally accepted that mutual exclusivity alone cannot account for the complexity of word learning but is instead “more like heuristics in problem-solving."
Sandra Robin Waxman is an American cognitive and developmental psychologist. She is a Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and director of the university's Infant and Child Development Center. She is known for her work on the development of language and concepts in infants and children.
Eve V. Clark is a British-born American linguist. Clark's research focuses on first language acquisition, especially the acquisition of meaning. She has done extensive observational and experimental research. She has also worked on the acquisition and use of word-formation, including comparative studies of English and Hebrew in children and adults. Some of her current studies examine what children can learn about conventional ways to say things based on adult responses to child errors during acquisition. She has studied the pragmatics of coining words.
Aletha C. Huston is an American developmental psychologist and professor known for her research on the effects of poverty on children, on how child care and income support policies impact children's development, and for ground-breaking research on the impact of television and media usage on child development. Huston is the Priscilla Pond Flawn Regents Professor Emeritus in Child Development at the University of Texas at Austin.
Patricia J. Bauer is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Psychology at Emory University. She is known for her research in the field of cognitive development, with a specific focus on how children develop their earliest memories and how their memory is influenced by parents, peers, and the environment around them. Her research has explored the phenomenon of childhood amnesia and how social, cognitive, and neural changes relate to the development of autobiographical memory.
Jill G. de Villiers is a developmental psychologist known for her work in the field of language acquisition. She is the Sophia and Austin Smith Professor Emerita of Psychology and Philosophy at Smith College. de Villiers is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. In 2018, she was elected as a Member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Vikram Kenneth Jaswal is a developmental psychologist known for his work on autism, particularly augmentative communication supports for nonspeaking autistic people using the discredited method of facilitated communication. He holds the position of Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia.
Elika Bergelson is a language scientist known for her work on language acquisition and cognitive development. She was the principal investigator of the SEEDLingS project, a longitudinal study of word learning in infants from 6 to 18 months. Bergelson was selected for Forbes' 30 under 30 in 2015 for her work on language acquisition.
References
- ↑ "Ellen Markman's Profile | Stanford Profiles". profiles.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2021-12-03.
- ↑ "Ellen Markman". National Academy of Sciences . Retrieved December 8, 2015.
