Maureen A Callanan
Biographic Data
| ID | 3481971 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Maureen A Callanan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Maureen A |
| FAMILY NAME | Callanan |
| SIGNATURE | CALLANAN M A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Cruz |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2676-4001 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 124 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Latine caregivers’ storytelling with their preschoolers about science, nature, and identity
Family storytelling can support the development of children’s cognitive skills and sense of identity. The current study explored Latine caregivers’ storytelling as a resource for promoting their young children’s science learning. One-hundred and fifteen U.S. Latine caregivers were video recorded sharing a nature- or science-related story with their 3- to 5-year-old children and reporting why they shared that story. Most caregivers told autobiogra…
Parents’ spatial talk to boys and girls in museum settings: Variations by science topic and exhibit scale
Introduction Children are exposed to STEM ideas, including spatial and other mathematical concepts, in a variety of everyday contexts through interactions with their parents. There may be variations in the spatial language that boys and girls hear from their parents within different informal contexts. The present study investigated variations in the frequency and type of parental spatial talk that occurred in museum settings that varied by topic …
Explaining and exploring the dynamics of parent–child interactions and children's causal reasoning at a children's museum exhibit
This study examines how parents' and children's explanatory talk and exploratory behaviors support children's causal reasoning at a museum in San Jose, CA in 2017. One-hundred-nine parent–child dyads (3–6 years; 56 girls, 53 boys; 32 White, 9 Latino/Hispanic, 17 Asian-American, 17 South Asian, 1 Pacific Islander, 26 mixed ethnicity, 7 unreported) played at an air flow exhibit with a nonobvious causal mechanism. Children's causal reasoning was pro…
Dismantling Persistent Deficit Narratives About the Language and Literacy of Culturally and Linguistically Minoritized Children and Youth: Counter-Possibilities
Despite decades of efforts, deficit narratives regarding language development and use by children and students from historically marginalized backgrounds remain persistent in the United States. Examining selective literature, we discuss the ideologies that undergird two deficit narratives: the notion that some children have a “word gap” when compared to their White middle-class peers, and students must develop “academic language” to engage in rig…
Unusual artifacts: Linking parents' STEM background and children's animacy judgments to parent–child play with robots
Although prior work has investigated children's judgments of robots' animacy, we take a sociocultural perspective to extend this research by exploring how families' interactions with a robot and parents' STEM background relate to children's understanding of robots. We explored the social context of parent–child goal-directed play with an educational robot and asked whether children's judgments of the robot's animacy were predicted by (a) age, (b)…
The importance of understanding children’s lived experience
The Organization of Informal Learning
Informal learning is often treated as simply an alternative to formal, didactic instruction. This chapter discusses how the organization of informal learning differs across distinct settings but with important commonalities distinguishing informal learning from formal learning: Informal learning is nondidactic, is embedded in meaningful activity, builds on the learner’s initiative or interest or choice (rather than resulting from external demands…
Evidence Against Deficit Accounts: Conversations About Science in Mexican Heritage Families Living in the United States
Neoliberal deficit approaches assume that parents’ schooling level predicts their effective guidance of children’s science learning. In four case studies of Mexican-heritage parents—two with Basic Schooling and two with Higher Schooling—and their 4-year-old children, we explored conversational science practices—questioning, making predictions, evaluating evidence—during a sink-and-float game. Contrary to deficit accounts, Basic Schooling parents …
Learning words from labeling and directive speech
Despite the common intuition that labeling may be the best way to teach a new word to a child, systematic testing is needed of the prediction that children learn words better from labeling utterances than from directive utterances. Two experiments compared toddlers’ label learning in the context of hearing words used in directive versus labeling utterances. In Study 1 ( N = 64) 24-month-olds learned a novel label equally well from directive and l…
Commentary on special section: Deficit or difference? Interpreting diverse developmental paths
In this special section, 6 articles address the provocative question of how to determine the boundary between difference and deficiency, for children who differ from the mainstream in some way--language, hearing, cultural background, socioeconomic status, or social understanding. Our commentary considers these articles in light of current models of cultural diversity, raising 4 warning signals about the danger of assuming deficits. Whereas childr…
Links between parents' epistemological stance and children's evidence talk
Recent experimental research highlights young children's selectivity in learning from others. Little is known, however, about the patterns of information that children actually encounter in conversations with adults. This study investigated variation in parents' tendency to focus on testable evidence as a way to answer science-related questions (e.g., causes of climate change, extinction of species) and asked whether this is related to children's…
Parents’ object labeling: Possible links to conventionality of word meaning
Parents’ potential contributions to children’s developing understanding of conventionality in word meanings were investigated by examining how parents label objects for their children (12-, 18-, and 24-month-olds) in a free-play session with different types of toys. The study asks whether parents give subtle clues that names for things are conventions that must be discovered through conversation with other people (i.e., labels are ‘in the minds’ …
Conventionality in family conversations about everyday objects
Children's developing understanding that words have conventional meanings and objects have conventional functions emerges in parent-child activity and conversation. Drawing on family conversations in everyday settings, the chapter explores an apparent paradox between a global analysis of conventionality as stable shared knowledge and a local notion of conventions as flexibly negotiated in activity
Why Things Happen: Teleological Explanation in Parent-Child Conversations
Research indicates that young children, unlike adults, have a generalized tendency to view not only artifacts but also living and nonliving natural phenomena as existing for a purpose. To further understand this tendency's origin, the authors explored parents' propensity to invoke teleological explanation during explanatory conversations with their children. Over 2 weeks, Mexican-descent mothers were interviewed about question-answer exchanges wi…
Multiple Labels for Objects in Conversations With Young Children: Parents' Language and Children's Developing Expectations About Word Meanings
Children sometimes seem to expect words to have mutually exclusive meanings in certain contexts of early word learning. In 2 studies, 12- to 24-month-old children and their parents were videotaped as they engaged in conversations while playing with sets of toys (sea creatures, vehicles, doll clothing) in free-play, storytelling, and categorization contexts. In both studies, parents demonstrated a reliable preference to provide just 1 label for a …
The Role of Educational Background, Activity, and Past Experiences in Mexican-Descent Families’ Science Conversations
Debate exists regarding the extent to which Mexican-descent parent-child conversations are explanatory. Moreover, suggestions have been made that differences in the amount of explanatory conversation may be based on parents’educational background. This article reports on two studies investigating conversations between parents and children in two different contexts. Results of an observational study conducted at a children’s museum reveal that alt…
Parents Explain More Often to Boys Than to Girls During Shared Scientific Thinking
Young children's everyday scientific thinking often occurs in the context of parent-child interactions. In a study of naturally occurring family conversation, parents were three times more likely to explain science to boys than to girls while using interactive science exhibits in a museum. This difference in explanation occurred despite the fact that parents were equally likely to talk to their male and female children about how to use the exhibi…
Learning Words through Overhearing
Recent research indicates that toddlers can monitor others' conversations, raising the possibility that they can acquire vocabulary in this way. Three studies examined 2-year-olds' (N= 88) ability to learn novel words when overhearing these words used by others. Children aged 2,6 were equally good at learning novel words— both object labels and action verbs—when they were overhearers as when they were directly addressed. For younger 2-year-olds (…
Shared scientific thinking in everyday parent‐child activity
Current accounts of the development of scientific reasoning focus on individual children's ability to coordinate the collection and evaluation of evidence with the creation of theories to explain the evidence. This observational study of parent–child interactions in a children's museum demonstrated that parents shape and support children's scientific thinking in everyday, nonobligatory activity. When children engaged an exhibit with parents, thei…
Contents Vol. 42, 1999
Culture, Cognition, and Biology: Contexts for the Developing Mind
Review Articles| June 09 1999 Culture, Cognition, and Biology: Contexts for the Developing Mind: Essay Review of Katherine Nelson's Language in Cognitive Development: Emergence of the Mediated Mind1 Subject Area: Psychiatry and Psychology , Women's and Children's Health Maureen A. Callanan Maureen A. Callanan University of California, Santa Cruz, Calif., USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Human Developme…
Conversation and Conceptual Development: Challenges, Alternatives, and Future Directions
Labels and explanations in mother–child emotion talk: Age and gender differentiation
Mothers' and preschoolers' emotion talk was examined for age- (2, 3, and 4 years) and gender-related patterns in the use of labels and explanations. Although labels directly refer to emotions, explanations link emotion words to causal information. Children used emotion words mainly in labels. Boys' emotion talk showed an age increase; in contrast, the youngest group of girls talked about emotion much more frequently than did same-age boys, and th…
Metarepresentation in action: 3-, 4-, And 5-Year-Olds' Developing Theories of Mind in Parent-Child Conversations
Using a cross-sectional natural language database, the authors investigated the parent-child conversations of 36 three-, 4-, and 5-year-olds to explore 2 issues regarding the development of metarepresentation. First, children's uses of explicit contrastives (ECs)--utterances that explicitly contrast 2 differing mental states--were explored. Four-year-olds and, to a greater extent, 5-year-olds were found to reliably use ECs. Second, parents' respo…
Labels and explanations in mother-child emotion talk: Age and gender differentiation
Labels and explanations in mother–child emotion talk: Age and gender differentiation
Mothers' and preschoolers' emotion talk was examined for age- (2, 3, and 4 years) and gender-related patterns in the use of labels and explanations. Although labels directly refer to emotions, explanations link emotion words to causal information. Children used emotion words mainly in labels. Boys' emotion talk showed an age increase; in contrast, the youngest group of girls talked about emotion much more frequently than did same-age boys, and th…
The importance of understanding children’s lived experience
Metarepresentation in action: 3-, 4-, And 5-Year-Olds' Developing Theories of Mind in Parent-Child Conversations
Using a cross-sectional natural language database, the authors investigated the parent-child conversations of 36 three-, 4-, and 5-year-olds to explore 2 issues regarding the development of metarepresentation. First, children's uses of explicit contrastives (ECs)--utterances that explicitly contrast 2 differing mental states--were explored. Four-year-olds and, to a greater extent, 5-year-olds were found to reliably use ECs. Second, parents' respo…
Metarepresentation in action: 3-, 4-, And 5-Year-Olds' Developing Theories of Mind in Parent–child Conversations
Conversations with mothers and siblings: Young childrens' semantic and conceptual development
This study compared teaching and learning measures of 16 mother-child and sibling dyads playing a picture categorization game. Target children (mean age = 3 years 11 months) participated in 2 separate sessions, 1 with their mother and 1 with their older sibling (mean age = 6 years 11 months). Although siblings' teaching styles directed target children to make the correct choices, mothers provided information to help target children make choices o…
Parents and Siblings as Early Resources for Young Children's Learning in Mexican-Descent Families
This study explored the ways in which both parents and older siblings are important resources for young children 's learning in the home context. Parents from 50 Mexicandescent families were interviewed in their homes and were asked questions regarding the kinds of causal questions their children ask, and the different skills their children learn from one another. Parents reported that their children ask questions about complex phenomena in impor…
Why Things Happen: Teleological Explanation in Parent-Child Conversations
Research indicates that young children, unlike adults, have a generalized tendency to view not only artifacts but also living and nonliving natural phenomena as existing for a purpose. To further understand this tendency's origin, the authors explored parents' propensity to invoke teleological explanation during explanatory conversations with their children. Over 2 weeks, Mexican-descent mothers were interviewed about question-answer exchanges wi…
Multiple Labels for Objects in Conversations With Young Children: Parents' Language and Children's Developing Expectations About Word Meanings
Children sometimes seem to expect words to have mutually exclusive meanings in certain contexts of early word learning. In 2 studies, 12- to 24-month-old children and their parents were videotaped as they engaged in conversations while playing with sets of toys (sea creatures, vehicles, doll clothing) in free-play, storytelling, and categorization contexts. In both studies, parents demonstrated a reliable preference to provide just 1 label for a …
Links between parents' epistemological stance and children's evidence talk
Recent experimental research highlights young children's selectivity in learning from others. Little is known, however, about the patterns of information that children actually encounter in conversations with adults. This study investigated variation in parents' tendency to focus on testable evidence as a way to answer science-related questions (e.g., causes of climate change, extinction of species) and asked whether this is related to children's…
Development of object categories and inclusion relations: Preschoolers' hypotheses about word meanings
Commentary on special section: Deficit or difference? Interpreting diverse developmental paths
In this special section, 6 articles address the provocative question of how to determine the boundary between difference and deficiency, for children who differ from the mainstream in some way--language, hearing, cultural background, socioeconomic status, or social understanding. Our commentary considers these articles in light of current models of cultural diversity, raising 4 warning signals about the danger of assuming deficits. Whereas childr…
The Role of Educational Background, Activity, and Past Experiences in Mexican-Descent Families’ Science Conversations
Debate exists regarding the extent to which Mexican-descent parent-child conversations are explanatory. Moreover, suggestions have been made that differences in the amount of explanatory conversation may be based on parents’educational background. This article reports on two studies investigating conversations between parents and children in two different contexts. Results of an observational study conducted at a children’s museum reveal that alt…
Development of object categories and inclusion relations: Preschoolers' hypotheses about word meanings
Conversations with mothers and siblings: Young childrens' semantic and conceptual development
This study compared teaching and learning measures of 16 mother-child and sibling dyads playing a picture categorization game. Target children (mean age = 3 years 11 months) participated in 2 separate sessions, 1 with their mother and 1 with their older sibling (mean age = 6 years 11 months). Although siblings' teaching styles directed target children to make the correct choices, mothers provided information to help target children make choices o…
Parents and Siblings as Early Resources for Young Children's Learning in Mexican-Descent Families
This study explored the ways in which both parents and older siblings are important resources for young children 's learning in the home context. Parents from 50 Mexicandescent families were interviewed in their homes and were asked questions regarding the kinds of causal questions their children ask, and the different skills their children learn from one another. Parents reported that their children ask questions about complex phenomena in impor…
Labels and explanations in mother–child emotion talk: Age and gender differentiation
Mothers' and preschoolers' emotion talk was examined for age- (2, 3, and 4 years) and gender-related patterns in the use of labels and explanations. Although labels directly refer to emotions, explanations link emotion words to causal information. Children used emotion words mainly in labels. Boys' emotion talk showed an age increase; in contrast, the youngest group of girls talked about emotion much more frequently than did same-age boys, and th…
Metarepresentation in action: 3-, 4-, And 5-Year-Olds' Developing Theories of Mind in Parent-Child Conversations
Using a cross-sectional natural language database, the authors investigated the parent-child conversations of 36 three-, 4-, and 5-year-olds to explore 2 issues regarding the development of metarepresentation. First, children's uses of explicit contrastives (ECs)--utterances that explicitly contrast 2 differing mental states--were explored. Four-year-olds and, to a greater extent, 5-year-olds were found to reliably use ECs. Second, parents' respo…
Labels and explanations in mother-child emotion talk: Age and gender differentiation
Metarepresentation in action: 3-, 4-, And 5-Year-Olds' Developing Theories of Mind in Parent–child Conversations
Contents Vol. 42, 1999
Culture, Cognition, and Biology: Contexts for the Developing Mind
Review Articles| June 09 1999 Culture, Cognition, and Biology: Contexts for the Developing Mind: Essay Review of Katherine Nelson's Language in Cognitive Development: Emergence of the Mediated Mind1 Subject Area: Psychiatry and Psychology , Women's and Children's Health Maureen A. Callanan Maureen A. Callanan University of California, Santa Cruz, Calif., USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Human Developme…
Conversation and Conceptual Development: Challenges, Alternatives, and Future Directions
Parents Explain More Often to Boys Than to Girls During Shared Scientific Thinking
Young children's everyday scientific thinking often occurs in the context of parent-child interactions. In a study of naturally occurring family conversation, parents were three times more likely to explain science to boys than to girls while using interactive science exhibits in a museum. This difference in explanation occurred despite the fact that parents were equally likely to talk to their male and female children about how to use the exhibi…
Learning Words through Overhearing
Recent research indicates that toddlers can monitor others' conversations, raising the possibility that they can acquire vocabulary in this way. Three studies examined 2-year-olds' (N= 88) ability to learn novel words when overhearing these words used by others. Children aged 2,6 were equally good at learning novel words— both object labels and action verbs—when they were overhearers as when they were directly addressed. For younger 2-year-olds (…
Shared scientific thinking in everyday parent‐child activity
Current accounts of the development of scientific reasoning focus on individual children's ability to coordinate the collection and evaluation of evidence with the creation of theories to explain the evidence. This observational study of parent–child interactions in a children's museum demonstrated that parents shape and support children's scientific thinking in everyday, nonobligatory activity. When children engaged an exhibit with parents, thei…
The Role of Educational Background, Activity, and Past Experiences in Mexican-Descent Families’ Science Conversations
Debate exists regarding the extent to which Mexican-descent parent-child conversations are explanatory. Moreover, suggestions have been made that differences in the amount of explanatory conversation may be based on parents’educational background. This article reports on two studies investigating conversations between parents and children in two different contexts. Results of an observational study conducted at a children’s museum reveal that alt…
Multiple Labels for Objects in Conversations With Young Children: Parents' Language and Children's Developing Expectations About Word Meanings
Children sometimes seem to expect words to have mutually exclusive meanings in certain contexts of early word learning. In 2 studies, 12- to 24-month-old children and their parents were videotaped as they engaged in conversations while playing with sets of toys (sea creatures, vehicles, doll clothing) in free-play, storytelling, and categorization contexts. In both studies, parents demonstrated a reliable preference to provide just 1 label for a …
Why Things Happen: Teleological Explanation in Parent-Child Conversations
Research indicates that young children, unlike adults, have a generalized tendency to view not only artifacts but also living and nonliving natural phenomena as existing for a purpose. To further understand this tendency's origin, the authors explored parents' propensity to invoke teleological explanation during explanatory conversations with their children. Over 2 weeks, Mexican-descent mothers were interviewed about question-answer exchanges wi…
Conventionality in family conversations about everyday objects
Children's developing understanding that words have conventional meanings and objects have conventional functions emerges in parent-child activity and conversation. Drawing on family conversations in everyday settings, the chapter explores an apparent paradox between a global analysis of conventionality as stable shared knowledge and a local notion of conventions as flexibly negotiated in activity
Parents’ object labeling: Possible links to conventionality of word meaning
Parents’ potential contributions to children’s developing understanding of conventionality in word meanings were investigated by examining how parents label objects for their children (12-, 18-, and 24-month-olds) in a free-play session with different types of toys. The study asks whether parents give subtle clues that names for things are conventions that must be discovered through conversation with other people (i.e., labels are ‘in the minds’ …
Commentary on special section: Deficit or difference? Interpreting diverse developmental paths
In this special section, 6 articles address the provocative question of how to determine the boundary between difference and deficiency, for children who differ from the mainstream in some way--language, hearing, cultural background, socioeconomic status, or social understanding. Our commentary considers these articles in light of current models of cultural diversity, raising 4 warning signals about the danger of assuming deficits. Whereas childr…
Links between parents' epistemological stance and children's evidence talk
Recent experimental research highlights young children's selectivity in learning from others. Little is known, however, about the patterns of information that children actually encounter in conversations with adults. This study investigated variation in parents' tendency to focus on testable evidence as a way to answer science-related questions (e.g., causes of climate change, extinction of species) and asked whether this is related to children's…
Learning words from labeling and directive speech
Despite the common intuition that labeling may be the best way to teach a new word to a child, systematic testing is needed of the prediction that children learn words better from labeling utterances than from directive utterances. Two experiments compared toddlers’ label learning in the context of hearing words used in directive versus labeling utterances. In Study 1 ( N = 64) 24-month-olds learned a novel label equally well from directive and l…
The Organization of Informal Learning
Informal learning is often treated as simply an alternative to formal, didactic instruction. This chapter discusses how the organization of informal learning differs across distinct settings but with important commonalities distinguishing informal learning from formal learning: Informal learning is nondidactic, is embedded in meaningful activity, builds on the learner’s initiative or interest or choice (rather than resulting from external demands…
Evidence Against Deficit Accounts: Conversations About Science in Mexican Heritage Families Living in the United States
Neoliberal deficit approaches assume that parents’ schooling level predicts their effective guidance of children’s science learning. In four case studies of Mexican-heritage parents—two with Basic Schooling and two with Higher Schooling—and their 4-year-old children, we explored conversational science practices—questioning, making predictions, evaluating evidence—during a sink-and-float game. Contrary to deficit accounts, Basic Schooling parents …
The importance of understanding children’s lived experience
Dismantling Persistent Deficit Narratives About the Language and Literacy of Culturally and Linguistically Minoritized Children and Youth: Counter-Possibilities
Despite decades of efforts, deficit narratives regarding language development and use by children and students from historically marginalized backgrounds remain persistent in the United States. Examining selective literature, we discuss the ideologies that undergird two deficit narratives: the notion that some children have a “word gap” when compared to their White middle-class peers, and students must develop “academic language” to engage in rig…
Psychology (27 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (21 works) · Developmental psychology (20 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Cognitive psychology (10 works) · Early Childhood Education and Development (10 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Cognition (7 works) · Linguistics (7 works) · Communication (6 works)