Intergenerational influence and ontogenetic development in the emergence of spatial grammar in Nicaraguan Sign Language

The recent emergence of a new sign language among deaf children and adolescents in Nicaragua provides an opportunity to study how grammatical features of a language arise and spread, and how new language environments are constructed. The grammatical regularities that underlie language use reside largely outside the domain of explicit awareness. Nevertheless, knowledge of these regularities must be transmitted from one generation to the next to survive as part of the language. During this transmission, language form and use is shaped by both the characteristics of ontogenetic development within individual users and by historical changes in patterns of interaction between users. To capture this process, the present study follows the emergence of spatial modulations in Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL). A comprehension task examining interpretations of spatially modulated verbs reveals that new form-function mappings arise among children who functionally differentiate previously equivalent forms. The new mappings are then acquired by their age peers (who are also children), and by subsequent generations of children who learn the language, but not by adult contemporaries. As a result, language emergence is characterized by a convergence on form within each age cohort, and a mismatch in form from one age cohort to the cohort that follows. In this way, each age cohort, in sequence, transforms the language environment for the next, enabling each new cohort of learners to develop further than its predecessors.     

Aligning body and world: Stable reference frames improve young children’s search for hidden objects

This study investigated how young children’s increasingly flexible use of spatial reference frames enables accurate search for hidden objects by using a task that 3-year-olds have been shown to perform with great accuracy and 2-year-olds have been shown to perform inaccurately. Children watched as an object was rolled down a ramp, behind a panel of doors, and stopped at a barrier visible above the doors. In two experiments, we gave 2- and 2.5-year-olds a strong reference frame by increasing the relative salience and stability of the barrier. In Experiment 1, 2.5-year-olds performed at above-chance levels with the more salient barrier. In Experiment 2, we highlighted the stability of the barrier (or ramp) by maximizing the spatial extent of each reference frame across the first four training trials. Children who were given a stable barrier (and moving ramp) during these initial trials performed at above-chance levels and significantly better than children who were given a stable ramp (and moving barrier). This work highlights that factors central to spatial cognition and motor planning—aligning egocentric and object-centered reference frames—play a role in the ramp task during this transitional phase in development.     

The privileging of ‘Support-From-Below’ in early spatial language acquisition

Spatial terms that encode support (e.g., “on”, in English) are among the first to be understood by children across languages (e.g., Bloom, 1973; Johnston & Slobin, 1979). Such terms apply to a wide variety of support configurations, including Support-From-Below (SFB; cup on table) and Mechanical Support, such as stamps on envelopes, coats on hooks, etc. Research has yet to delineate infants’ semantic space for the term “on” when considering its full range of usage. Do infants initially map “on” to a very broad, highly abstract category – one including cups on tables, stamps on envelopes, etc.? Or do infants begin with a much more restricted interpretation - mapping “on” to certain configurations over others? Much infant cognition research suggests that SFB is an event category that infants learn about early - by five months of age (Baillargeon & DeJong, 2017) - raising the possibility that they may also begin by interpreting the word “on” as referring to configurations like cups on tables, rather than stamps on envelopes. Further, studies examining language production suggests that children and adults map the basic locative expression (BE on, in English) to SFB over Mechanical Support (Landau et al., 2016). We tested the hypothesis that this ‘privileging’ of SFB in early infant cognition and child and adult language also characterizes infants’ language comprehension. Using the Intermodal-Preferential-Looking-Paradigm in combination with infant eye-tracking, 20-month-olds were presented with two support configurations: SFB and Mechanical, Support-Via-Adhesion (henceforth, SVA). Infants preferentially mapped “is on” to SFB (rather than SVA) suggesting that infants differentiate between two quite different kinds of support configurations when mapping spatial language to these two configurations and more so, that SFB is privileged in early language understanding of the English spatial term “on”.     

Putting action in perspective

Embodied approaches to cognition propose that our own actions influence our understanding of the world. Do other people's actions also have this influence? The present studies show that perceiving another person's actions changes the way people think about objects in a scene. In Study 1, participants viewed a photograph and answered a question about the location of one object relative to another. The question either did or did not call attention to an action being performed in the scene. Studies 2 and 3 focused on whether depicting an action in a scene influenced perspective choice. Across all studies, drawing attention to action, whether verbally or pictorially, led observers to encode object locations from the actor's spatial perspective. Study 4 demonstrated that the tendency to adopt the actor's perspective might be mediated by motor experience.     

Perspective-taking in dialogue as self-organization under social constraints

We present a dynamical systems account of how simple social information influences perspective-taking. Our account is motivated by the notion that perspective-taking may obey common dynamic principles with perceptuomotor coupling. We turn to the prominent HKB dynamical model of motor coordination, drawing from basic principles of self-organization to describe how conversational perspective-taking unfolds in a low-dimensional attractor landscape. We begin by simulating experimental data taken from a simple instruction-following task, in which participants have different expectations about their interaction partner. By treating belief states as different values of a control parameter, we show that data generated by a basic dynamical process fits overall egocentric and other-centric response distributions, the time required for participants to enact a response on a trial-by-trial basis, and the action dynamics exhibited in individual trials. We end by discussing the theoretical significance of dynamics in dialog, arguing that high-level coordination such as perspective-taking may obey similar dynamics as perceptuomotor coordination, pointing to common principles of adaptivity and flexibility during dialog.     

Object imagery and object identification: object imagers are better at identifying spatially-filtered visual objects

Object imagery refers to the ability to construct pictorial images of objects. Individuals with high object imagery (high-OI) produce more vivid mental images than individuals with low object imagery (low-OI), and they encode and process both mental images and visual stimuli in a more global and holistic way. In the present study, we investigated whether and how level of object imagery may affect the way in which individuals identify visual objects. High-OI and low-OI participants were asked to perform a visual identification task with spatially-filtered pictures of real objects. Each picture was presented at nine levels of filtering, starting from the most blurred (level 1: only low spatial frequencies—global configuration) and gradually adding high spatial frequencies up to the complete version (level 9: global configuration plus local and internal details). Our data showed that high-OI participants identified stimuli at a lower level of filtering than participants with low-OI, indicating that they were better able than low-OI participants to identify visual objects at lower spatial frequencies. Implications of the results and future developments are discussed.     

Source‐Goal Asymmetries in Motion Representation: Implications for Language Production and Comprehension

Recent research has demonstrated an asymmetry between the origins and endpoints of motion events, with preferential attention given to endpoints rather than beginnings of motion in both language and memory. Two experiments explore this asymmetry further and test its implications for language production and comprehension. Experiment 1 shows that both adults and 4‐year‐old children detect fewer within‐category changes in source than goal objects when tested for memory of motion events; furthermore, these groups produce fewer references to source than goal objects when describing the same motion events. Experiment 2 asks whether the specificity of encoding source/goal relations differs in both spatial memory and the comprehension of novel spatial vocabulary. Results show that endpoint configuration changes are detected more accurately than source configuration changes by both adults and young children. Furthermore, when interpreting novel motion verbs, both age groups expect more fine‐grained lexical distinctions in the domain of endpoint configurations compared to that of source configurations. These studies demonstrate that a cognitive‐attentional bias in spatial representation and memory affects both the detail of linguistic encoding during the use of spatial language and the specificity of hypotheses about spatial referents that learners build during the acquisition of the spatial lexicon.     

The role of language in acquiring object kind concepts in infancy

Four experiments investigated whether 9-month-old infants could use the presence of labels to help them establish a representation of two distinct objects in a complex object individuation task. We found that the presence of two distinct labels facilitated object individuation, but the presence of one label for both objects, two distinct tones, two distinct sounds, or two distinct emotional expressions did not. These findings suggest that language may play an important role in the acquisition of sortal/object kind concepts in infancy: words may serve as "essence placeholders". Implications for the relationship between language and conceptual development are discussed.     

Relative contribution of perception/cognition and language on spatial categorization

This study investigated the relative contribution of perception/cognition and language-specific semantics in nonverbal categorization of spatial relations. English and Korean speakers completed a video-based similarity judgment task involving containment, support, tight fit, and loose fit. Both perception/cognition and language served as resources for categorization, and allocation between the two depended on the target relation and the features contrasted in the choices. Whereas perceptual/cognitive salience for containment and tight-fit features guided categorization in many contexts, language-specific semantics influenced categorization where the two features competed for similarity judgment and when the target relation was tight support, a domain where spatial relations are perceptually diverse. In the latter contexts, each group categorized more in line with semantics of their language, that is, containment/support for English and tight/loose fit for Korean. We conclude that language guides spatial categorization when perception/cognition alone is not sufficient. In this way, language is an integral part of our cognitive domain of space.     

The impact of object type on the spatial analogies in Korean preschoolers

We tested young children’s spatial reasoning in a match-to-sample task, manipulating the objects in the task (abstract geometric shapes, line drawings of realistic objects, or both). Korean 4- and 5-year-old children (N = 161) generalized the target spatial configuration (i.e., on, in, above) more easily when the sample used geometric shapes and the choices used realistic objects than the reverse (i.e., realistic-object sample to geometric-shape choices). With within-type stimuli (i.e., sample and choices were both geometric shapes or both realistic objects), 5-year-old, but not 4-year-old, children generalized the spatial relations more easily with geometric shapes than realistic objects. In addition, children who knew more locative terms (e.g., “in”, “on”) performed better on the task, suggesting a link to children’s spatial vocabulary. The results demonstrate an advantage of geometric shapes over realistic objects in facilitating young children’s performance on a match-to-sample spatial reasoning task.     

What Does Children's Spatial Language Reveal About Spatial Concepts? Evidence From the Use of Containment Expressions

Children's overextensions of spatial language are often taken to reveal spatial biases. However, it is unclear whether extension patterns should be attributed to children's overly general spatial concepts or to a narrower notion of conceptual similarity allowing metaphor‐like extensions. We describe a previously unnoticed extension of spatial expressions and use a novel method to determine its origins. English‐ and Greek‐speaking 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds used containment expressions (e.g., English into, Greek mesa) for events where an object moved into another object but extended such expressions to events where the object moved behind or under another object. The pattern emerged in adult speakers of both languages and also in speakers of 10 additional languages. We conclude that learners do not have an overly general concept of Containment. Nevertheless, children (and adults) perceive similarities across Containment and other types of spatial scenes, even when these similarities are obscured by the conventional forms of the language.