Janellen Huttenlocher
Biographic Data
| ID | 1464052 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Janellen Huttenlocher |
| GIVEN NAMES | Janellen |
| FAMILY NAME | Huttenlocher |
| SIGNATURE | HUTTENLOCHER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 424 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1962 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Minding the gap: Children’s difficulty conceptualizing spatial intervals as linear measurement units
Understanding measurement units is critical to mathematics and science learning, but it is a topic that American students find difficult. In 3 studies, we investigated the challenges underlying this difficulty in kindergarten and second grade by comparing performance on different versions of a linear measurement task. Children measured crayons that were either aligned or shifted relative to the left edge of either a continuous ruler or a row of d…
New evidence about language and cognitive development based on a longitudinal study: Hypotheses for intervention
We review findings from a four-year longitudinal study of language learning conducted on two samples: a sample of typically developing children whose parents vary substantially in socioeconomic status, and a sample of children with pre- or perinatal brain injury. This design enables us to study language development across a wide range of language learning environments and a wide range of language learners. We videotaped samples of children's and …
Early puzzle play: A predictor of preschoolers' spatial transformation skill
Individual differences in spatial skill emerge prior to kindergarten entry. However, little is known about the early experiences that may contribute to these differences. The current study examined the relation between children's early puzzle play and their spatial skill. Children and parents (n = 53) were observed at home for 90 min every 4 months (6 times) between 2 and 4 years of age (26 to 46 months). When children were 4 years 6 months old, …
Children’s spatial thinking: does talk about the spatial world matter?: Children’s spatial thinking
In this paper we examine the relations between parent spatial language input, children's own production of spatial language, and children's later spatial abilities. Using a longitudinal study design, we coded the use of spatial language (i.e. words describing the spatial features and properties of objects; e.g. big, tall, circle, curvy, edge) from child age 14 to 46 months in a diverse sample of 52 parent-child dyads interacting in their home set…
Sources of variability in children’s language growth
What counts in the development of young children's number knowledge
Prior studies indicate that children vary widely in their mathematical knowledge by the time they enter preschool and that this variation predicts levels of achievement in elementary school. In a longitudinal study of a diverse sample of 44 preschool children, we examined the extent to which their understanding of the cardinal meanings of the number words (e.g., knowing that the word "four" refers to sets with 4 items) is predicted by the "number…
Priming a perspective in Spanish monolingual children: The use of syntactic alternatives
We used a syntactic priming paradigm to show priming effects for active and passive forms in monolingual Spanish-speaking four- and five-year-olds. In a baseline experiment, we examined children's use of the fue -passive form and found it was virtually non-existent in their speech, although they produced important elements of the form. Children used a more frequent Spanish passive form, the subjectless/ se -passive. In a priming experiment, we pr…
The Representation of Geometric Cues in Infancy
There is evidence that, from an early age, humans are sensitive to spatial information such as simple landmarks and the size of objects. This study concerns the ability to represent a particular kind of spatial information, namely, the geometry of an enclosed layout—an ability present in older children, adults, and nonhuman animals (e.g., Cheng, 1986; Hermer & Spelke, 1996). Using a looking‐time procedure, 4.5‐ to 6.5‐month‐olds were tested on wh…
Development of proportional reasoning: Where young children go wrong
Previous studies have found that children have difficulty solving proportional reasoning problems involving discrete units until 10 to 12 years of age, but can solve parallel problems involving continuous quantities by 6 years of age. The present studies examine where children go wrong in processing proportions that involve discrete quantities. A computerized proportional equivalence choice task was administered to kindergartners through 4th-grad…
Redirective labels and early vocabulary development
Parents' object labels can be distinguished by whether the child is already attending to the object (follow-in) or not (lead-in). Lead-in labels have been found to be associated with low vocabulary. The current study examines whether the relation between lead-in labels and child vocabulary is influenced by whether the child's attention is redirected. Eighteen mother–infant dyads were videotaped at 1 ; 2, 1 ; 6 and 1 ; 10. Results indicate that pa…
Bayesian integration of spatial information
Spatial judgments and actions are often based on multiple cues. The authors review a multitude of phenomena on the integration of spatial cues in diverse species to consider how nearly optimally animals combine the cues. Under the banner of Bayesian perception, cues are sometimes combined and weighted in a near optimal fashion. In other instances when cues are combined, how optimal the integration is might be unclear. Only 1 cue may be relied on,…
The varieties of speech to young children
This article examines caregiver speech to young children. The authors obtained several measures of the speech used to children during early language development (14-30 months). For all measures, they found substantial variation across individuals and subgroups. Speech patterns vary with caregiver education, and the differences are maintained over time. While there are distinct levels of complexity for different caregivers, there is a common patte…
Syntactic priming in 3- and 4-year-old children: Evidence for abstract representations of transitive and dative forms
The current studies used a syntactic priming paradigm with 3- and 4-year-old children. In Experiment 1, children were asked to describe a series of drawings depicting transitive and dative relations to establish baseline production levels. In Experiment 2, an experimenter described a similar series of drawings using one of two syntactic forms (i.e., active/passive for transitive; double-object/prepositional for dative). Children were then asked t…
Preschool children's mathematical knowledge: "The effect of teacher "math talk
This study examined the relation between the amount of mathematical input in the speech of preschool or day-care teachers and the growth of children's conventional mathematical knowledge over the school year. Three main findings emerged. First, there were marked individual differences in children's conventional mathematical knowledge by 4 years of age that were associated with socioeconomic status. Second, there were dramatic differences in the a…
Effects of language intervention on syntactic skill levels in preschoolers
Questions concerning the role of input in the growth of syntactic skills have generated substantial debate within psychology and linguistics. The authors address these questions by investigating the effects of experimentally manipulated input on children's skill with the passive voice. The study involved 72 four-year-olds who listened to stories containing either a high proportion of passive voice sentences or a high proportion of active voice se…
How Infants Encode Spatial Extent
This study explores how infants encode an object's spatial extent. We habituated 6.5‐month‐old infants to a dowel inside a container and then tested whether they dishabituate to a change in absolute size when the relation between dowel and container is held constant (by altering the size of both container and dowel) and when the relation changes (by altering only the size of the container but not the dowel). Infants only dishabituated when the re…
Syntactic priming in young children
Early Development of Scaling Ability
The map is a small-scaled version of the space it represents. It has been argued that children have difficulty interpreting maps because they do not understand scale relations. Recent research has shown that even preschoolers can solve problems that involve scaling in one dimension. This study examined whether early scaling ability extends to tasks involving two-dimensional maps and referent spaces of different sizes. Results showed that about 60…
Language input and child syntax
Multiple cues for quantification in infancy: Is number one of them
A review and synthesis of the literature on quantification in infancy and early childhood is provided. In most current conceptualizations, early quantification is assumed to be number based. However, the extant literature provides no clear-cut evidence that infants use number to perform quantitative tasks. Instead, new research suggests that quantification is initially based on nonnumerical cues, such as area and contour length, whether or not a …
Early fraction calculation ability
Three- to 7-year-olds' ability to calculate with whole-number, fraction, and mixed-number amounts was tested using a nonverbal task in which an amount was displayed and then hidden (J. Huttenlocher, N. C. Jordan, & S. C. Levine, 1994). Next, an amount was added to or subtracted from the hidden amount. The child's task was to determine the hidden amount that resulted from the transformation. Although fraction problems were more difficult than whol…
Early sex differences in spatial skill
Numerical abstraction in infants: Another look
This article examines an important finding from the literature on infant numerical competence. The finding, reported by P. Starkey, E. S. Spelke, and R. Gelman (1990), was that infants looked longer toward a visual display that was equal in number to an auditory set. In Experiment 1, when the procedures described by P. Starkey et al. were followed and duration was held constant across auditory sequences that varied in number, infants looked longe…
Differential calculation abilities in young children from middle- and low-income families
This study examined the performance of 42 middle- and 42 low-income kindergarten children on arithmetic calculations presented in a nonverbal format as well as in 3 different verbal formats. On the nonverbal task, the child was shown an initial set of disks, which was then hidden with a cover. The set was transformed by adding or removing disks. After the transformation, the child's task was to construct an array of disks that contained the same …
Children's early ability to solve perspective-taking problems
Piaget and Inhelder (1948/1967) claimed that, until 9 or 10 years of age, children had great difficulty with perspective taking. Huttenlocher and Presson (1979) showed, however, that these problems were linked to conflict between actual and imagined frames of reference; asking what object occupied a specified location with respect to a hypothetical observer (item questions) led to much better performance. The present experiments extend these find…
Early vocabulary growth: Relation to language input and gender
This study examines the role of exposure to speech in children's early vocabulary growth. It is generally assumed that individual differences in vocabulary depend, in large part, on variations in learning capacity. However, variations in exposure have not been systematically explored. In this study we characterize vocabulary growth rates for each of 22 children by using data obtained at several time points from 14 to 26 months. We find a substant…
What counts in the development of young children's number knowledge
Prior studies indicate that children vary widely in their mathematical knowledge by the time they enter preschool and that this variation predicts levels of achievement in elementary school. In a longitudinal study of a diverse sample of 44 preschool children, we examined the extent to which their understanding of the cardinal meanings of the number words (e.g., knowing that the word "four" refers to sets with 4 items) is predicted by the "number…
Preschool children's mathematical knowledge: "The effect of teacher "math talk
This study examined the relation between the amount of mathematical input in the speech of preschool or day-care teachers and the growth of children's conventional mathematical knowledge over the school year. Three main findings emerged. First, there were marked individual differences in children's conventional mathematical knowledge by 4 years of age that were associated with socioeconomic status. Second, there were dramatic differences in the a…
Early sex differences in spatial skill
Early puzzle play: A predictor of preschoolers' spatial transformation skill
Individual differences in spatial skill emerge prior to kindergarten entry. However, little is known about the early experiences that may contribute to these differences. The current study examined the relation between children's early puzzle play and their spatial skill. Children and parents (n = 53) were observed at home for 90 min every 4 months (6 times) between 2 and 4 years of age (26 to 46 months). When children were 4 years 6 months old, …
The varieties of speech to young children
This article examines caregiver speech to young children. The authors obtained several measures of the speech used to children during early language development (14-30 months). For all measures, they found substantial variation across individuals and subgroups. Speech patterns vary with caregiver education, and the differences are maintained over time. While there are distinct levels of complexity for different caregivers, there is a common patte…
Differential calculation abilities in young children from middle- and low-income families
This study examined the performance of 42 middle- and 42 low-income kindergarten children on arithmetic calculations presented in a nonverbal format as well as in 3 different verbal formats. On the nonverbal task, the child was shown an initial set of disks, which was then hidden with a cover. The set was transformed by adding or removing disks. After the transformation, the child's task was to construct an array of disks that contained the same …
Effects of language intervention on syntactic skill levels in preschoolers
Questions concerning the role of input in the growth of syntactic skills have generated substantial debate within psychology and linguistics. The authors address these questions by investigating the effects of experimentally manipulated input on children's skill with the passive voice. The study involved 72 four-year-olds who listened to stories containing either a high proportion of passive voice sentences or a high proportion of active voice se…
New evidence about language and cognitive development based on a longitudinal study: Hypotheses for intervention
We review findings from a four-year longitudinal study of language learning conducted on two samples: a sample of typically developing children whose parents vary substantially in socioeconomic status, and a sample of children with pre- or perinatal brain injury. This design enables us to study language development across a wide range of language learning environments and a wide range of language learners. We videotaped samples of children's and …
Early fraction calculation ability
Three- to 7-year-olds' ability to calculate with whole-number, fraction, and mixed-number amounts was tested using a nonverbal task in which an amount was displayed and then hidden (J. Huttenlocher, N. C. Jordan, & S. C. Levine, 1994). Next, an amount was added to or subtracted from the hidden amount. The child's task was to determine the hidden amount that resulted from the transformation. Although fraction problems were more difficult than whol…
Syntactic priming in 3- and 4-year-old children: Evidence for abstract representations of transitive and dative forms
The current studies used a syntactic priming paradigm with 3- and 4-year-old children. In Experiment 1, children were asked to describe a series of drawings depicting transitive and dative relations to establish baseline production levels. In Experiment 2, an experimenter described a similar series of drawings using one of two syntactic forms (i.e., active/passive for transitive; double-object/prepositional for dative). Children were then asked t…
Numerical abstraction in infants: Another look
This article examines an important finding from the literature on infant numerical competence. The finding, reported by P. Starkey, E. S. Spelke, and R. Gelman (1990), was that infants looked longer toward a visual display that was equal in number to an auditory set. In Experiment 1, when the procedures described by P. Starkey et al. were followed and duration was held constant across auditory sequences that varied in number, infants looked longe…
Development of proportional reasoning: Where young children go wrong
Previous studies have found that children have difficulty solving proportional reasoning problems involving discrete units until 10 to 12 years of age, but can solve parallel problems involving continuous quantities by 6 years of age. The present studies examine where children go wrong in processing proportions that involve discrete quantities. A computerized proportional equivalence choice task was administered to kindergartners through 4th-grad…
Children's early ability to solve perspective-taking problems
Piaget and Inhelder (1948/1967) claimed that, until 9 or 10 years of age, children had great difficulty with perspective taking. Huttenlocher and Presson (1979) showed, however, that these problems were linked to conflict between actual and imagined frames of reference; asking what object occupied a specified location with respect to a hypothetical observer (item questions) led to much better performance. The present experiments extend these find…
Minding the gap: Children’s difficulty conceptualizing spatial intervals as linear measurement units
Understanding measurement units is critical to mathematics and science learning, but it is a topic that American students find difficult. In 3 studies, we investigated the challenges underlying this difficulty in kindergarten and second grade by comparing performance on different versions of a linear measurement task. Children measured crayons that were either aligned or shifted relative to the left edge of either a continuous ruler or a row of d…
Early Development of Scaling Ability
The map is a small-scaled version of the space it represents. It has been argued that children have difficulty interpreting maps because they do not understand scale relations. Recent research has shown that even preschoolers can solve problems that involve scaling in one dimension. This study examined whether early scaling ability extends to tasks involving two-dimensional maps and referent spaces of different sizes. Results showed that about 60…
Multiple cues for quantification in infancy: Is number one of them
A review and synthesis of the literature on quantification in infancy and early childhood is provided. In most current conceptualizations, early quantification is assumed to be number based. However, the extant literature provides no clear-cut evidence that infants use number to perform quantitative tasks. Instead, new research suggests that quantification is initially based on nonnumerical cues, such as area and contour length, whether or not a …
Effects of Manipulation of Attributes on Efficiency of Concept Formation
In the typical concept formation experiment, instances of what a concept is and/or of what it is not are presented to Ss, and Ss' task is to determine the defining attributes of the concept. Ss may be required to make a response after each instance, indicating whether or not the instance represented the concept. Often several concepts are acquired simultaneously and Ss indicate after each instance which of the concepts has been presented by press…
Effects of Manipulation of Attributes on Efficiency of Concept Formation
Some Effects of Negative Instances on the Formation of Simple Concepts
Smoke (1933) first suggested that the efficiency of concept formation might be affected by presenting instances of what a concept is not rather than instances of what it is. He did not, however, evaluate the amounts of information transmitted by these nedative and instances. Meaningful comparison of efficiency in dealing with instances must be based on the pocential of each type of instance to transmit information about a concept. If a negative i…
Some Effects of Negative Instances on the Formation of Simple Concepts
Categories and particulars: Prototype effects in estimating spatial location.
A model of category effects on reports from memory is presented. The model holds that stimuli are represented at 2 levels of detail: a fine-grain value and a category. When memory is inexact but people must report an exact value, they use estimation processes that combine the remembered stimulus value with category information. The proposed estimation processes include truncation at category boundaries and weighting with a central (prototypic) ca…
Early vocabulary growth: Relation to language input and gender
This study examines the role of exposure to speech in children's early vocabulary growth. It is generally assumed that individual differences in vocabulary depend, in large part, on variations in learning capacity. However, variations in exposure have not been systematically explored. In this study we characterize vocabulary growth rates for each of 22 children by using data obtained at several time points from 14 to 26 months. We find a substant…
Differential calculation abilities in young children from middle- and low-income families
This study examined the performance of 42 middle- and 42 low-income kindergarten children on arithmetic calculations presented in a nonverbal format as well as in 3 different verbal formats. On the nonverbal task, the child was shown an initial set of disks, which was then hidden with a cover. The set was transformed by adding or removing disks. After the transformation, the child's task was to construct an array of disks that contained the same …
Children's early ability to solve perspective-taking problems
Piaget and Inhelder (1948/1967) claimed that, until 9 or 10 years of age, children had great difficulty with perspective taking. Huttenlocher and Presson (1979) showed, however, that these problems were linked to conflict between actual and imagined frames of reference; asking what object occupied a specified location with respect to a hypothetical observer (item questions) led to much better performance. The present experiments extend these find…
Numerical abstraction in infants: Another look
This article examines an important finding from the literature on infant numerical competence. The finding, reported by P. Starkey, E. S. Spelke, and R. Gelman (1990), was that infants looked longer toward a visual display that was equal in number to an auditory set. In Experiment 1, when the procedures described by P. Starkey et al. were followed and duration was held constant across auditory sequences that varied in number, infants looked longe…
Early fraction calculation ability
Three- to 7-year-olds' ability to calculate with whole-number, fraction, and mixed-number amounts was tested using a nonverbal task in which an amount was displayed and then hidden (J. Huttenlocher, N. C. Jordan, & S. C. Levine, 1994). Next, an amount was added to or subtracted from the hidden amount. The child's task was to determine the hidden amount that resulted from the transformation. Although fraction problems were more difficult than whol…
Early sex differences in spatial skill
Language input and child syntax
Multiple cues for quantification in infancy: Is number one of them
A review and synthesis of the literature on quantification in infancy and early childhood is provided. In most current conceptualizations, early quantification is assumed to be number based. However, the extant literature provides no clear-cut evidence that infants use number to perform quantitative tasks. Instead, new research suggests that quantification is initially based on nonnumerical cues, such as area and contour length, whether or not a …
Syntactic priming in young children
Early Development of Scaling Ability
The map is a small-scaled version of the space it represents. It has been argued that children have difficulty interpreting maps because they do not understand scale relations. Recent research has shown that even preschoolers can solve problems that involve scaling in one dimension. This study examined whether early scaling ability extends to tasks involving two-dimensional maps and referent spaces of different sizes. Results showed that about 60…
How Infants Encode Spatial Extent
This study explores how infants encode an object's spatial extent. We habituated 6.5‐month‐old infants to a dowel inside a container and then tested whether they dishabituate to a change in absolute size when the relation between dowel and container is held constant (by altering the size of both container and dowel) and when the relation changes (by altering only the size of the container but not the dowel). Infants only dishabituated when the re…
Preschool children's mathematical knowledge: "The effect of teacher "math talk
This study examined the relation between the amount of mathematical input in the speech of preschool or day-care teachers and the growth of children's conventional mathematical knowledge over the school year. Three main findings emerged. First, there were marked individual differences in children's conventional mathematical knowledge by 4 years of age that were associated with socioeconomic status. Second, there were dramatic differences in the a…
Effects of language intervention on syntactic skill levels in preschoolers
Questions concerning the role of input in the growth of syntactic skills have generated substantial debate within psychology and linguistics. The authors address these questions by investigating the effects of experimentally manipulated input on children's skill with the passive voice. The study involved 72 four-year-olds who listened to stories containing either a high proportion of passive voice sentences or a high proportion of active voice se…
Redirective labels and early vocabulary development
Parents' object labels can be distinguished by whether the child is already attending to the object (follow-in) or not (lead-in). Lead-in labels have been found to be associated with low vocabulary. The current study examines whether the relation between lead-in labels and child vocabulary is influenced by whether the child's attention is redirected. Eighteen mother–infant dyads were videotaped at 1 ; 2, 1 ; 6 and 1 ; 10. Results indicate that pa…
Bayesian integration of spatial information
Spatial judgments and actions are often based on multiple cues. The authors review a multitude of phenomena on the integration of spatial cues in diverse species to consider how nearly optimally animals combine the cues. Under the banner of Bayesian perception, cues are sometimes combined and weighted in a near optimal fashion. In other instances when cues are combined, how optimal the integration is might be unclear. Only 1 cue may be relied on,…
The varieties of speech to young children
This article examines caregiver speech to young children. The authors obtained several measures of the speech used to children during early language development (14-30 months). For all measures, they found substantial variation across individuals and subgroups. Speech patterns vary with caregiver education, and the differences are maintained over time. While there are distinct levels of complexity for different caregivers, there is a common patte…
Syntactic priming in 3- and 4-year-old children: Evidence for abstract representations of transitive and dative forms
The current studies used a syntactic priming paradigm with 3- and 4-year-old children. In Experiment 1, children were asked to describe a series of drawings depicting transitive and dative relations to establish baseline production levels. In Experiment 2, an experimenter described a similar series of drawings using one of two syntactic forms (i.e., active/passive for transitive; double-object/prepositional for dative). Children were then asked t…
The Representation of Geometric Cues in Infancy
There is evidence that, from an early age, humans are sensitive to spatial information such as simple landmarks and the size of objects. This study concerns the ability to represent a particular kind of spatial information, namely, the geometry of an enclosed layout—an ability present in older children, adults, and nonhuman animals (e.g., Cheng, 1986; Hermer & Spelke, 1996). Using a looking‐time procedure, 4.5‐ to 6.5‐month‐olds were tested on wh…
Development of proportional reasoning: Where young children go wrong
Previous studies have found that children have difficulty solving proportional reasoning problems involving discrete units until 10 to 12 years of age, but can solve parallel problems involving continuous quantities by 6 years of age. The present studies examine where children go wrong in processing proportions that involve discrete quantities. A computerized proportional equivalence choice task was administered to kindergartners through 4th-grad…
Priming a perspective in Spanish monolingual children: The use of syntactic alternatives
We used a syntactic priming paradigm to show priming effects for active and passive forms in monolingual Spanish-speaking four- and five-year-olds. In a baseline experiment, we examined children's use of the fue -passive form and found it was virtually non-existent in their speech, although they produced important elements of the form. Children used a more frequent Spanish passive form, the subjectless/ se -passive. In a priming experiment, we pr…
Psychology (31 works) · Developmental psychology (19 works) · Cognitive psychology (18 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (15 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Cognitive and developmental aspects of mathematical skills (11 works) · Language Development and Disorders (10 works) · Linguistics (9 works) · Mathematics (9 works) · Mathematics Education and Teaching Techniques (8 works)