Lois Bloom | |
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Title | Professor Emerita of Psychology and Education |
Awards |
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Academic background | |
Alma mater | |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Psychology |
Sub-discipline | Developmental psychology |
Institutions | Columbia University |
Main interests | language development |
Lois Masket Bloom is an American developmental psychologist and Edward Lee Thorndike Professor Emerita of Psychology and Education at Teachers College,Columbia University. [1] Her pioneering research elucidated the roles of cognition,emotion,and social behavior in language acquisition. [2]
Bloom is the author of several books on language acquisition,including One Word At a Time:The Use of Single-Word Utterances Before Syntax [3] , the culmination of Bloom's first longitudinal study,and the first-ever published study of language acquisition to use video-recorded data. Language Development From Two To Three [4] a collection of findings from research studies spanning two decades,highlights the tremendous achievements in language acquisition that occur during this period of childhood. For Language Development and Language Disorders [5] , which she co-wrote with Margaret Lahey,Bloom connected her research with her early experience as a speech therapist working with language-delayed children. It offers guidelines for speech therapists assessing and assisting children with language delays. [2] The Transition From Infancy to Language:Acquiring the Power of Expression [6] was the inaugural winner of the Eleanor E. Maccoby Book Award from the American Psychological Association, [7] Division 7,which recognizes the author of influential books in the field of developmental psychology.
Bloom received her B.A. in 1956 from Pennsylvania State University,where she is a distinguished alumna. Today,the Penn State Child Study Center holds annual Lois Bloom Lecture on child development, [8] funded by gifts from Bloom and psychologist Edward Lee Thorndike.
Bloom earned her M.A. at the University of Maryland in 1958,and her Ph.D. with distinction at Columbia University in 1968. [9] Her dissertation,Language Development:Form and Function in Emerging Grammars, [10] was supervised by sociolinguist William Labov. Her research,involving case studies of the early utterances of three children,was highly influential in the field of language acquisition. [11]
Bloom received the Distinguished Achievement Award by the New York City Speech-Hearing-Language Association in 1986,and received honors from the American Speech–Language–Hearing Association in 1992. [12] She received the G. Stanley Hall Medal from the American Psychological Association for Distinguished Contributions to Developmental Psychology in 1997, [13] and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Society for Research in Child Development in 2003.
Bloom's research helped usher in a semantic revolution in the field of language acquisition. [14] Linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky hypothesized a “language acquisition device”—hard-wired structures in the brain dedicated to language acquisition—to account for the speed with which infants learn language. In contrast,Bloom's research,according to The New York Times,"pioneered the new trend" of examining children's two-word utterances for semantic intent as well as word distribution. [15] By focusing on the semantics of children's utterances,she demonstrated that language reflects how children make meaning out of their previously non-linguistic representations of knowledge.
Throughout her career,Bloom remained focused on placing the child,and his or her environment,at the center of her research. In her keynote address at Boston University's 25th Conference on Language development,Bloom discussed her concern that advances in technology allowed researchers to study a child's utterances while ignoring the context in which the child produces that language. [16] In The Intentionality Model and Language Acquisition, [17] she refers to the "authority of the child"—of central importance is the child's contents of mind,which he or she expresses through language and behavior. According to Bloom's theory,interaction with the world,and the feedback that results,drives development. The intentionality model [18] Bloom developed with researcher Erin Tinker depicts language development as the result of engagement and effort. It takes work to acquire language,and engagement with one's environment motivates the child to do that work. Knowledge of language,according to this model,exists at the intersection of use,content,and form—all are necessary for language to develop. Based on her findings that highly emotional babies are slower to learn language,Bloom theorized that babies learn best when they are able to focus on the environment,rather than on their own feelings. [19]
Bloom contributed two corpora in the CHILDES database. The Bloom70 corpus comprises recordings and transcripts she collected for her dissertation,and Bloom73 consists of recordings of her daughter Allison as a child.
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language,as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate.
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind and brain;that is,the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire,use,comprehend,and produce language.
Baby talk is a type of speech associated with an older person speaking to a child or infant. It is also called caretaker speech,infant-directed speech (IDS),child-directed speech (CDS),child-directed language (CDL),caregiver register,parentese,or motherese.
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.
Phonological awareness is an individual's awareness of the phonological structure,or sound structure,of words. Phonological awareness is an important and reliable predictor of later reading ability and has,therefore,been the focus of much research.
An interlanguage is an idiolect which has been developed by a learner of a second language (L2) which preserves some features of their first language (L1) and can overgeneralize some L2 writing and speaking rules. These two characteristics give an interlanguage its unique linguistic organization. It is idiosyncratically based on the learner's experiences with L2. An interlanguage can fossilize,or cease developing,in any of its developmental stages. It is claimed that several factors shape interlanguage rules,including L1 transfer,previous learning strategies,strategies of L2 acquisition,L2 communication strategies,and the overgeneralization of L2 language patterns.
Language development in humans is a process which starts early in life. Infants start without knowing a language,yet by 10 months,babies can distinguish speech sounds and engage in babbling. Some research has shown that the earliest learning begins in utero when the fetus starts to recognize the sounds and speech patterns of its mother's voice and differentiate them from other sounds after birth.
Bootstrapping is a term used in language acquisition in the field of linguistics. It refers to the idea that humans are born innately equipped with a mental faculty that forms the basis of language. It is this language faculty that allows children to effortlessly acquire language. As a process,bootstrapping can be divided into different domains,according to whether it involves semantic bootstrapping,syntactic bootstrapping,prosodic bootstrapping,or pragmatic bootstrapping.
Developmental linguistics is the study of the development of linguistic ability in an individual,particularly the acquisition of language in childhood. It involves research into the different stages in language acquisition,language retention,and language loss in both first and second languages,in addition to the area of bilingualism. Before infants can speak,the neural circuits in their brains are constantly being influenced by exposure to language. Developmental linguistics supports the idea that linguistic analysis is not timeless,as claimed in other approaches,but time-sensitive,and is not autonomous –social-communicative as well as bio-neurological aspects have to be taken into account in determining the causes of linguistic developments.
A sentence word is a single word that forms a full sentence.
Katherine Nelson was an American developmental psychologist,and professor.
In language acquisition,negative evidence is information concerning what is not possible in a language. Importantly,negative evidence does not show what is grammatical;that is positive evidence. In theory,negative evidence would help eliminate ungrammatical constructions by revealing what is not grammatical. Direct negative evidence refers to comments made by an adult language-user in response to a learner's ungrammatical utterance. Indirect negative evidence refers to the absence of ungrammatical sentences in the language that the child is exposed to. There is debate among linguists and psychologists about whether negative evidence can help children determine the grammar of their language. Negative evidence,if it is used,could help children rule out ungrammatical constructions in their language.
Direct negative evidence is a term used in the study of the acquisition of language. It describes the attempts of competent speakers of a language to guide the grammatical use of novice speakers,such as children.
Lois Holzman is director and co-founder of the East Side Institute in New York,New York,where she developed social therapy methods with Fred Newman. She is known for her research and work on play therapy,social therapy,and criticism of the medical model of mental health. She was instrumental in introducing the ideas of Lev Vygotsky to the fields of psychotherapy,organizational and community development. In 2014,Holzman received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cultural-Historical Research Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association.
Martin Dimond Stewart Braine was a cognitive psychologist known for his research on the development of language and reasoning. He was Professor of Psychology at New York University at the time of his death.
Lauren Bernstein Adamson was a developmental psychologist known for her research on communicative development,parent-child interaction,and joint attention in infants with typical and atypical developmental trajectories. She was a Regents' Professor Emerita of Psychology at Georgia State University.
Frances Degen Horowitz was an American developmental psychologist who served as President of the Graduate Center,City University of New York from 1991 to 2005. She was instrumental in raising the stature of the institution and moving it to its current location in the B. Altman and Company Building on Fifth Avenue of New York City.
Beatrice Beebe is a clinical psychologist known for her research in attachment and early infant-parent communication. Her work helped established the importance of non-verbal communication in early child development. She is a Clinical Professor of Medical Psychology at the College of Physicians &Surgeons,Columbia University and the director of the Communications Science Lab at the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI).
Caroline F. Rowland is a British psychologist known for her work on child first language development,grammar acquisition,and the role of environment in child's language growth. Since 2016,she has been the Director of the Language Development Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. She holds the position of Professor of First Language Acquisition by Special Appointment at Donders Centre for Cognition at Radboud University Nijmegen. She has also been an Honorary Research Associate in Psychological Sciences at University of Liverpool since 2018.
Lois Hayden Meek Stolz (1891–1984) was an American psychologist and educator in the field of child development and parent-child relations. She was a (full) professor of psychology at Stanford University and the author of several highly regarded texts.