Funded Grants

Encoding abstract concepts in language

Natural language, unlike other animal communication systems, provides a rich combinatorial system that encodes meaning structurally, allowing a finite set of words to express an unbounded number of thoughts. My research investigates how children acquire the logical representations that underlie language, and thus how they learn abstract, uniquely human, concepts. A guiding hypothesis of this work is that many important conceptual changes in human development do not require the creation of entirely novel representations, but instead emerge from the representational resources provided by natural language.

My research asks how children learn words and structures that are inherently abstract. Although many words that children learn early in development refer to kinds of objects and events in the world (e.g., rabbit, hop), they also must learn words like some, every, and five, which don’t refer to objects, or even to their properties. Instead, these words refer to the properties of sets. For example, in a group of five rabbits, no individual animal has the property of “fiveness”. Further, many different types of sets can be described by five, including people, places, events, and ideas. These words, and other logical expressions in language, pose a special problem to children, and offer a unique window into the origin of human knowledge.

By studying how children acquire abstract words, my research program engages three fundamental problems that confront psychology. The first problem is how we can explain the acquisition of concepts that do not transparently reflect properties of the physical world. What are the first assumptions that children make about such words when they hear them in language, and what kinds of evidence do they use to decode their meanings? Second, I am interested in how linguistic structure affects learning, and whether grammatical differences between languages cause differences in conceptual development. Are there concepts that are easier to learn in some languages than in others? Or do cross-linguistic differences have little effect on the rate at which concepts emerge in development? Finally, my research asks whether linguistic variation across cultures results in different ways of perceiving and reasoning about the world in adult language users. Do speakers perceive the world differently depending on the words provided by their language? Or do words merely express concepts that are available to all humans, regardless of cross-linguistic differences?

My plan for the coming years is to explore the relationship between linguistic structure and conceptual development by tackling problems ranging from how children learn the meanings of abstract words, to how they learn to count and do mathematical computations. To determine the contributions of cultural and linguistic diversity on conceptual development, the research will be conducted across a diverse range of sites including the US, Japan, Taiwan, India, and Mexico. This work will confront a key psychological problem -- how abstract representations emerge in human cognition -- while exploring the effect of linguistic diversity on language and conceptual development.