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.
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek is the Stanley and Deborah Lefkowitz Professor of Psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she directs the Temple University Infant Language Laboratory. She is the author of 14 books and over 200 publications on early childhood and infant development, with a specialty in language and literacy, and playful learning. Her book, Becoming Brilliant, written with colleague Roberta Golinkoff, was on the NYT Best Seller's list in education and parenting. Hirsh-Pasek is also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center for Universal Education. She was the past president of the International Congress of Infant Studies and was on the governing board of the Society for Research in Child Development.
Susan E. Carey is an American psychologist who is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. She studies language acquisition and children's development of concepts and is known for introducing the concept of fast mapping, whereby children learn the meanings of words after a single exposure. Her research focuses on analyzing philosophical concepts, and conceptual changes in science over time. She has conducted experiments on infants, toddlers, adults, and non-human primates.
Nora S. Newcombe is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology and the James H. Glackin Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Temple University. She is a Canadian-American researcher in cognitive development, cognitive psychology and cognitive science, and expert on the development of spatial thinking and reasoning and episodic memory. She was the principal investigator of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (2006-2018), one of six Science of Learning Centers funded by the National Science Foundation.
Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Comparative Human Development, the college, and the Committee on Education at the University of Chicago. She is the principal investigator of a 10-year program project grant, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, designed to explore the impact of environmental and biological variation on language growth. She is also a co-PI of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC), one of six Science of Learning Centers funded by the National Science Foundation to explore learning in an interdisciplinary framework with an eye toward theory and application. She is the founding editor of Language Learning and Development, the official journal of the Society for Language Development. She was President of the International Society for Gesture Studies from 2007–2012.
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.
Learning through play is a term used in education and psychology to describe how a child can learn to make sense of the world around them. Through play children can develop social and cognitive skills, mature emotionally, and gain the self-confidence required to engage in new experiences and environments.
Katherine Nelson was an American developmental psychologist, and professor.
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, its substance, color, or texture, 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.
The James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award is an award of the Association for Psychological Science given since 1992. The award is named after James McKeen Cattell and "honors individuals for their lifetime of significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology." As part of APS’s 25th Anniversary, the APS Board of Directors recognized a larger class of James McKeen Cattell Fellows in 2013, identifying them as individuals who have had a profound impact on the field of psychological science over the previous quarter century.”
Kimberly Wright Cassidy was named the ninth president of Bryn Mawr College on February 12, 2014 and was formally inaugurated on September 20, 2014. She had served as interim president since Jane Dammen McAuliffe ended her term as president on June 30, 2013.
Karen E. Adolph is a psychologist and professor known for her research in the field of infant motor development. She is the 2017 recipient of the Kurt-Koffka medal from the University of Giessen. Previous honors include the 1999 APA Boyd McCandless Award and 2002 American Psychological Foundation Robert L. Fantz Memorial Award. She has served as the President of the International Congress on Infant Studies. Adolph and her colleagues developed computerized video coding software, called Datavyu, and state-of-the-art recording technology to observe and code behavior. A related project, Databrary, provides a repository for video recordings of behavior and encourages open data sharing across research labs. Adolph is a recipient of a MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development in support of her innovative research.
Frances K. Graham was an American psychologist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Delaware, where she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1988.
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.
Cas Holman is an American toy designer. She is known for designing toys that emphasize creativity through unstructured play.
Dare Ann Baldwin is a scientist known for her research on learning mechanisms and early social skills of infants and young children. Baldwin is a Professor of Psychology at Oregon University. Baldwin is the recipient of various awards including the 1994 Boyd McCandless Award from Division 7 of the American Psychological Association, 1995 John Merck Scholars Award, 1997 APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology, 2006-2007 James McKeen Cattell Sabbatical Fellowship, 2006 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, 2006-2007 University of Oregon Fund for Faculty Excellence Award, and 2018 University of Oregon Faculty Research Award.
Carol McDonald Connor was an educational psychologist known for her research contributions to the field of early literacy development in diverse learners, in particular for work on individualized student instruction interventions and the lattice model of reading development. She held the position of Chancellor's Faculty and Equity Advisor in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine.
Allyssa K. McCabe is a psychological scientist known for her work on narrative development. She is Professor Emerita of Psychology in the College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and affiliated with the Center for Autism Research & Education (CARE).
