Shape up: An eye-tracking study of preschoolers’ shape name processing and spatial development.

Verdine, Brian N.; Bunger, Ann; Athanasopoulou, Angeliki; Golinkoff, Roberta Michnick; Hirsh‐Pasek, Kathy

doi:10.1037/dev0000384

Cited by 18 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 43 publications

(69 reference statements)

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“…That is, perhaps children who master spatial terms at a younger age have an advantage in spatial reasoning tasks over those who learn these terms later. Verdine et al (2017) found that speed at identifying shape terms at 3 years predicted later spatial skill, but did not predict concurrent spatial skill, lending support to this hypothesis. If dimensional adjective comprehension shows nonlinear growth, where children who learned the terms later could catch up to their early learning peers, we might be missing an effect of growth, seen by Pruden et al (2011).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…In recent years interest has grown in the role of spatial language in early cognitive development (e.g., Bowerman & Choi, 2003;Ferrara et al, 2011;Pruden et al, 2011;Ratliff & Newcombe, 2008;Verdine et al, 2017). These studies look primarily at how a variety of spatial language word types influence thinking (e.g., size, location, shape terms).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Pruden et al (2011) found that children's use of spatial terms describing spatial properties and features of objects or people in toddlerhood and early childhood was predictive of their performance on spatial reasoning tasks at four and a half. Additionally, Verdine et al (2017) found that how quickly children identified shapes at three was predictive of their later spatial reasoning skill. The current study looks at whether dimensional adjectives predict children's performance on spatial scaling, a spatial reasoning task that requires a strong comprehension of relative distance.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Interest in the role of spatial language in early development has grown in recent years (Casasola, 2006;Ferrara, Hirsh-Pasek, Newcombe, Golinkoff, & Lam, 2011;Pruden et al, 2011;Verdine, Bunger, Athanasopoulou, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These studies have looked at spatial language in many ways including children's expressive language use (Ferrara et al, 2011;Pruden et al, 2011), processing speed for shape terms (Verdine et al, 2017), and teaching children a novel spatial term (Casasola, 2006). However, the specific role of dimensional adjectives has been largely neglected in contemporary studies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Development of Spatial Vocabulary

Odean¹

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I have been incredibly lucky to have the support of many smart and giving people throughout the process of completing this dissertation. First, I must thank my advisor Dr. Shannon Pruden for her support and enthusiasm for the project from the earliest idea of a new measure through the final draft. This project would be much weaker were it not for the guidance of my committee members, Drs. Eliza Nelson, Stefany Coxe, and Virginia Mueller Gathercole. Without the help of other members of my lab, I could not have completed this project. To Paulina Bollat, who provided audio recordings for my measures, and without whom I would not have been able to collect nearly as large a sample. To Daniela Alvarez, Sergio Marquez, and Ariel Aguerro, for your help recruiting participants, compiling materials, and assessing children. Thank you to my grad school friends, Carla Abad, Alina Nazareth, Iris Broce, and Jessica Saunders, who have been an invaluable resource and some of my closest friends. To my parents, Martha Wellbaum and Terrance Odean, my sisters Naomi, Isabel, and Sarah, and my brother-in-law David, who have supported me so much throughout my academic career. Thank you for teaching me to love school and statistics, for reading countless papers and proposals, and for supporting me through rejections and successes. Thank you to my boyfriend, Michael, for his love and patience, and for reminding me that, ultimately, this project would end.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Development of Spatial Vocabulary

Odean¹

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Do focused interests support word learning? A study with autistic and nonautistic children

Arunachalam,

Steele,

Pelletier

et al. 2024

Autism Research

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Although focused interests are often associated with a diagnosis of autism, they are common in nonautistic individuals as well. Previous studies have explored how these interests impact cognitive, social, and language development. While some research has suggested that strong interests can detract from learning (particularly for autistic children), newer research has indicated that they can be advantageous. In this pre‐registered study, we asked whether focused interests support word learning in 44 autistic children and a vocabulary‐matched sample of 44 nonautistic children (mean ages 58 and 34 months respectively). In a word‐learning task administered over Zoom, children were exposed to an action labeled by a novel word. The action was either depicted by their focused interest or by a neutral image; stimuli were personalized for each child. At test, they were asked to identify the referent of the novel word, and their eye gaze was evaluated as a measure of learning. The preregistered analyses revealed an effect of focused interests, and post‐hoc analyses clarified that autistic children learned the novel word in both the focused interest and neutral conditions, while nonautistic children only showed evidence of learning in the neutral condition. These results suggest that focused interests are not disruptive for vocabulary learning in autism, and thus they could be utilized in programming that supports early language learning in this population.

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Examining the female‐talker default in experimental language acquisition research

Holtz,

Papineau

2023

Infant and Child Development

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Experimental research on language acquisition and development regularly employs auditory stimuli as part of the methodology. This project analyses the apparent standard practice of using female speakers to produce these experimental materials and the potential consequences of such a practice. To situate the discussion in the current scientific landscape we present a systematic review of published literature between 2017 and 2022 to establish how prevalent this practice is. The review finds a strong bias in favour of female‐spoken stimuli across publications in a curated set of nine journals. We discuss this result in light of gender‐based workplace inequality, changing caregiver expectations and the reliability of infants' assumed female voice preference. This project seeks to encourage researchers to consider how diversifying the stimuli used in these types of studies would lead to both a more inclusive and representative research landscape, as well as ensure that our research results are generalizable.

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Shape up: An eye-tracking study of preschoolers’ shape name processing and spatial development.

Cited by 18 publications

References 43 publications

The Development of Spatial Vocabulary

The Development of Spatial Vocabulary

Do focused interests support word learning? A study with autistic and nonautistic children

Examining the female‐talker default in experimental language acquisition research

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