Learning words from Social Interactions
Researcher: Elena Luchkina
In this set of studies we are looking at the role of socially contingent interactions, such as turn-taking in speech or reacting to someone’s speech with actions, in shaping children’s understanding that language is communicative and referential. We look at naturalistic parent-child interactions and online experiments to explore these questions.
Compositionality
Researcher: Stephanie Alderete
When do we develop the ability to combine or compose concepts? This project aims to understand whether concepts combine in the same way that words combine into sentences by testing both preschoolers and pre-linguistic infants. Compositionality is a key component of human cognition, learning, and development. Understanding how compositionality develops will be important when thinking about how to create intelligent machines that think and learn like children and adults.
Decision Making
Researcher: Stephanie Alderete
These studies investigate how children use their understanding of probabilities and possibilities to guide their decision-making. Children play a fun game where they try to collect gumballs from gumball machines. Through these studies, we hope to better understand the developmental origins of inductive and deductive reasoning.
Changing Children's Intergroup Biases and Social Stereotypes
Reseacher: Rongzhi Liu
In these studies, we investigate whether children’s intergroup biases (attitudes and beliefs about their own social groups versus other social groups) can be changed given new evidence. We study both novel social groups and real social groups (racial and ethnic groups). These studies would help us understand the malleability of biases in childhood and help us design interventions to combat biases from a young age.
Chinese Compositionality
Reseacher: Tina Tang
Compositional ability combines multiple component parts into a complex expression and conveys a precise meaning when using language or other symbolic systems. This ability is a crucial component of language learning and understanding and a key aspect of human intelligence and cognitive ability. This study investigates the development of compositionally
by seeing whether non-Chinese-speaking children will spontaneously notice the regularity or similarity, decompose the parts of the Chinese characters, and re-use the radicals to make guesses about the meaning of new characters.
Friendship
Reseacher: Rongzhi Liu
In these studies, we investigate whether children’s intergroup biases (attitudes and beliefs about their own social groups versus other social groups) can be changed given new evidence. We study both novel social groups and real social groups (racial and ethnic groups). These studies would help us understand the malleability of biases in childhood and help us design interventions to combat biases from a young age.
