CCF Speaker Series Anna Shusterman Ph.D. 10-17-2014

The Language/Thought Interface in Development Anna Shusterman, Ph.D. How do language and thought influence each other during development? Drawing on the cases of spatial and numerical cognition, I will discuss recent work from my lab exploring this question. For both cases, I will show evidence of previously unreported correlations between these two domains that raise questions about the mechanisms through which language and cognition become linked. In the case of space, I will focus on three studies exploring the hypothesis that acquiring frame-of-reference terms (left-right, north-south) causally affects spatial representation in three different populations: English-speaking preschoolers, two cohorts of Nicaraguan Sign Language users, and Kichwa-speaking adults outside of Quito, Ecuador (*Kichwa is a dialect of Quechua spoken in Ecuador). In the case of number, I will focus on emerging evidence that numerical acuity (in the analog magnitude system) and the acquisition of counting knowledge are correlated even in preschoolers, and show some new data from oral-deaf preschoolers that could begin to shed light on the causal direction of this relationship. These studies suggest that language acquisition is deeply tied to the development of non-verbal conceptual systems for representing space and number, raising new questions and hypotheses about the roots of this relationship.

Anna Shusterman Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Wesleyan University

10/17/2014 4:00:00 PM