Linda B Smith
Biographic Data
| ID | 3591832 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Linda B Smith |
| GIVEN NAMES | Linda B |
| FAMILY NAME | Smith |
| SIGNATURE | SMITH L B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Indiana University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7163-8181 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 30 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Place value learning in kindergarten
Building on previous findings that preschool children develop an awareness of base-ten structure from informal exposure to multidigit numbers, we tested whether kindergarten children would benefit from formal place value instruction, using this informal foundation as a starting point. A total of 124 U.S. kindergarten students participated in a school-based study that used a pretest-training-posttest design. One group of students completed 20 brie…
Look before you reach: Fixation‐reach latencies predict reaching kinematics in toddlers
Research on infant and toddler reaching has shown evidence for motor planning after the initiation of the reaching action. However, the reach action sequence does not begin after the initiation of a reach but rather includes the initial visual fixations onto the target object occurring before the reach. We developed a paradigm that synchronizes head‐mounted eye‐tracking and motion capture to determine whether the latency between the first visual …
Discourse with few words: Coherence statistics, parent-infant actions on objects, and object names
events that surround parent naming of objects. Parents and 12-month -old infants were left alone in a room for 10 minutes with 32 objects available for exploration. Parent and infant handling of objects and parent naming of objects were coded. The four measured statistics were from measures used in the study of coherent discourse: (1) a frequency distribution in which actions were frequently directed to a few objects and more rarely to other obje…
The temporal structure of parent talk to toddlers about objects
Scene saliencies in egocentric vision and their creation by parents and infants
The development of place value concepts: Approximation before principles
Place value concepts were measured longitudinally from kindergarten (2017) to first grade (2018) in a diverse sample (n = 279; Mage = 5.76 years, SD = 0.55; 135 females; 41% Black, 38% White, 8% Asian, 12% Latino). Children completed three syntactic tasks that required an explicit understanding of base-10 symbols and three approximate tasks that could be completed without this explicit understanding. Approximate performance was significantly bett…
The First Step to Learning Place Value: A Role for Physical Models
Very few questions have cast such an enduring effect in cognitive science as the question of “symbol-grounding”: Do human-invented symbol systems have to be grounded to physical objects to gain meanings? This question has strongly influenced research and practice in education involving the use of physical models and manipulatives. However, the evidence on the effectiveness of physical models is mixed. We suggest that rethinking physical models in…
Learning the generative principles of a symbol system from limited examples
Number Representations Drive Number-Line Estimates
The number-line task has been extensively used to study the mental representation of numbers in children. However, studies suggest that proportional reasoning provides a better account of children’s performance. Ninety 4- to 6-year-olds were given a number-line task with symbolic numbers, with clustered dot arrays that resembled a perceptual scaling task, or with spread-out dot arrays that involved numerical estimation. Children performed well wi…
Parents Influence the Visual Learning Environment Through Children's Manual Actions
The present research studied children in the second year of life (N = 29, Mage = 21.14 months, SD = 2.64 months) using experimental manipulations within and between subjects to show that responsive parental influence helps children have more frequent sustained object holds with fewer switches between objects compared to when parents are either not involved or over-involved. Regardless of parental involvement, sustained holds were visually rich, b…
What are the building blocks of parent–infant coordinated attention in free‐flowing interaction
The present article investigated the composition of different joint gaze components used to operationalize various types of coordinated attention between parents and infants and which types of coordinated attention were associated with future vocabulary size. Twenty‐five 9‐month‐old infants and their parents wore head‐mounted eye trackers as they played with objects together. With high‐density gaze data, a variety of coordinated attention bout ty…
The Signal in the Noise: The Visual Ecology of Parents' Object Naming
The uncertainty of reference has long been considered a key challenge for young word learners. Recent studies of head camera wearing toddlers and their parents during object play have revealed that from toddlers' views, the referents of parents' object naming are often visually quite clear. Although these studies have promising theoretical implications, they were all conducted in stripped‐down laboratory contexts. The current study examines the v…
Multimodal parent behaviors within joint attention support sustained attention in infants
Parents support and scaffold more mature behaviors in their infants. Recent research suggests that parent-infant joint visual attention may scaffold the development of sustained attention by extending the duration of an infant's attention to an object. The open question concerns the parent behaviors that occur within joint-attention episodes and support infant sustained attention to an object. In the study, parent-infant dyads played with objects…
Why are faces denser in the visual experiences of younger than older infants
Recent evidence from studies using head cameras suggests that the frequency of faces directly in front of infants declines over the first year and a half of life, a result that has implications for the development of and evolutionary constraints on face processing. Two experiments tested 2 opposing hypotheses about this observed age-related decline in the frequency of faces in infant views. By the people-input hypothesis, there are more faces in …
The Words Children Hear: Picture Books and the Statistics for Language Learning
Young children learn language from the speech they hear. Previous work suggests that greater statistical diversity of words and of linguistic contexts is associated with better language outcomes. One potential source of lexical diversity is the text of picture books that caregivers read aloud to children. Many parents begin reading to their children shortly after birth, so this is potentially an important source of linguistic input for many child…
Early comprehension of the Spanish plural
Understanding how linguistic cues map to the environment is crucial for early language comprehension and may provide a way for bootstrapping and learning words. Research has suggested that learning how plural syntax maps to the perceptual environment may show a trajectory in which children first learn surrounding cues (verbs, modifiers) before a full mastery of the noun morpheme alone. The Spanish plural system of simple codas, dominated by one a…
Joint Attention without Gaze Following: Human Infants and Their Parents Coordinate Visual Attention to Objects through Eye-Hand Coordination
The coordination of visual attention among social partners is central to many components of human behavior and human development. Previous research has focused on one pathway to the coordination of looking behavior by social partners, gaze following. The extant evidence shows that even very young infants follow the direction of another's gaze but they do so only in highly constrained spatial contexts because gaze direction is not a spatially prec…
Verbs and attention to relational roles in English and Tamil
English-learning children have been shown to reliably use cues from argument structure in learning verbs. However, languages pair overtly expressed arguments with verbs to varying extents, raising the question of whether children learning all languages expect the same, universal mapping between arguments and relational roles. Three experiments examined this question by asking how strongly early-learned verbs by themselves, without their correspon…
It’s all connected: Pathways in visual object recognition and early noun learning
A developmental pathway may be defined as the route, or chain of events, through which a new structure or function forms. For many human behaviors, including object name learning and visual object recognition, these pathways are often complex and multicausal and include unexpected dependencies. This article presents three principles of development that suggest the value of a developmental psychology that explicitly seeks to trace these pathways a…
Embodied attention and word learning by toddlers
Object associations of early-learned light and heavy English verbs
Many of the verbs that young children learn early have been characterized as ‘light.’ However, there is no agreed upon definition of ‘lightness’ and no useable metric that could be applied to a wide array of verbs. This article provides evidence for one metric by which the ‘lightness’ of early-learned verbs might be measured: the number of objects with which they are associated (in adult judgment) or co-occur (in speech to and by children). The r…
Verbs and Syntactic Frames in Children’s Elicited Actions: A Comparison of Tamil- and English-Speaking Children
Action as developmental process – a commentary on Iverson's ‘Developing language in a developing body: The relationship between motor development and language development’
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
An Embodied Account of Argument Structure Development
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:All information enters the cognitive system through the body. Thus, it is possible that the body—and its morphology—may play a role in structurng knowledge and acquisition. This idea is particularly cogent in the case of verbs, since early learned verbs are about bodily actions and since recent advanc-es in cognitive neuroscience (Pulvermueller, 2005; James and Maouene, 2009) indicate that the neura…
Cross-linguistic differences in talking about scenes
Count nouns, adjectives, and perceptual properties in children's novel word interpretations
Three-year-old children were shown a novel exemplar toy and asked to judge test items that differed from the exemplar in shape, coloration, or material substance. In the count noun condition, children judged whether test items had the same novel name as the exemplar. In the adjective condition, children judged whether a test hern could be described by the same novel adjective as the exemplar. The results of 3 experiments indicated that children s…
Multimodal parent behaviors within joint attention support sustained attention in infants
Parents support and scaffold more mature behaviors in their infants. Recent research suggests that parent-infant joint visual attention may scaffold the development of sustained attention by extending the duration of an infant's attention to an object. The open question concerns the parent behaviors that occur within joint-attention episodes and support infant sustained attention to an object. In the study, parent-infant dyads played with objects…
An attentional learning account of the shape bias: Reply to Cimpian and Markman (2005) and Booth, Waxman, and Huang (2005)
Recently, Developmental Psychology published 2 articles on the shape bias; both rejected the authors' previous proposals about the role of attentional learning in the development of a shape bias in object name learning. A. Cimpian and E. Markman (2005) did so by arguing that the shape bias does not exist but is an experimental artifact. A. E. Booth, S. R. Waxman, and Y. T. Huang (2005), in contrast, concluded that the shape bias (and its contextu…
Learning color words involves learning a system of mappings
This research examines the difficulty children encounter when acquiring 2 specific sets of adjectives, color and size words, and suggests that children must acquire a system of mapping in learning these words. Children were assessed on 4 types of mappings (word-word maps, property-property maps, word-property maps, and word-word-property maps) by completing 3 color tasks. Children also participated in comparable tasks for size words. In Study 1, …
It’s all connected: Pathways in visual object recognition and early noun learning
A developmental pathway may be defined as the route, or chain of events, through which a new structure or function forms. For many human behaviors, including object name learning and visual object recognition, these pathways are often complex and multicausal and include unexpected dependencies. This article presents three principles of development that suggest the value of a developmental psychology that explicitly seeks to trace these pathways a…
Why are faces denser in the visual experiences of younger than older infants
Recent evidence from studies using head cameras suggests that the frequency of faces directly in front of infants declines over the first year and a half of life, a result that has implications for the development of and evolutionary constraints on face processing. Two experiments tested 2 opposing hypotheses about this observed age-related decline in the frequency of faces in infant views. By the people-input hypothesis, there are more faces in …
Cross-linguistic differences in talking about scenes
Adults' Acquisition of Novel Dimension Words: Creating a Semantic Congruity Effect
The semantic congruity effect is exhibited when adults are asked to compare pairs of items from a series, and their response is faster when the direction of the comparison coincides with the location of the stimuli in the series. For example, people are faster at picking the bigger of 2 big items than the littler of 2 big items. In the 4 experiments presented, adults were taught new dimensional adjectives (mal/ler and borg/er). Characteristics of…
Audition and visual attention: The developmental trajectory in deaf and hearing populations
This study examined the development of visual attention in 5- to 13-year-olds who differed in their access to sound. Hearing children, deaf children with cochlear implants, and deaf children without implants participated in a task in which they were to respond to some visual signals and not others. The results of Experiment I indicated that the timing of developmental changes in visual selective attention was similar for all 3 groups, occurring a…
The importance of shape in early lexical learning
Count nouns, adjectives, and perceptual properties in children's novel word interpretations
Three-year-old children were shown a novel exemplar toy and asked to judge test items that differed from the exemplar in shape, coloration, or material substance. In the count noun condition, children judged whether test items had the same novel name as the exemplar. In the adjective condition, children judged whether a test hern could be described by the same novel adjective as the exemplar. The results of 3 experiments indicated that children s…
A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action
A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action presents a comprehensive and detailed theory of early human development based on the principles of dynamic systems theory. Beginning with their own research in motor, perceptual, and cognitive development, Thelen and Smith raise fundamental questions about prevailing assumptions in the field. They propose a new theory of the development of cognition and action, unifying recent …
The Acquisition of the Lexicon
The nature of the mental lexicon, Edwin Williams and Beth Levin discovering the word units, Anne Cutler et al categorizing the world, Susan Carey and Frank C. Keil categories, words and language, Ellen M. Markman et al the case of verbs, Cynthia Fischer, D. Geoffrey Hall et al procedures for verb learning, Michael R. Brent et al
Audition and visual attention: The developmental trajectory in deaf and hearing populations
This study examined the development of visual attention in 5- to 13-year-olds who differed in their access to sound. Hearing children, deaf children with cochlear implants, and deaf children without implants participated in a task in which they were to respond to some visual signals and not others. The results of Experiment I indicated that the timing of developmental changes in visual selective attention was similar for all 3 groups, occurring a…
Learning color words involves learning a system of mappings
This research examines the difficulty children encounter when acquiring 2 specific sets of adjectives, color and size words, and suggests that children must acquire a system of mapping in learning these words. Children were assessed on 4 types of mappings (word-word maps, property-property maps, word-property maps, and word-word-property maps) by completing 3 color tasks. Children also participated in comparable tasks for size words. In Study 1, …
Counting nouns and verbs in the input: Differential frequencies, different kinds of learning
Previous research has focused on evaluating the nouns and verbs in parents' input through type/token ratios. This research offers an additional means of evaluating parent speech by first examining the frequencies of individual nouns, verbs and descriptors and second examining the learning task presented to children. Study 1 examines 25 transcripts from the CHILDES database of English-speaking parents' speech to children at five developmental leve…
From Knowledge to Knowing: Real Progress in the Study of Infant Categorization
The four articles in this thematic collection present real progress in the study of infant categorization. In this commentary, I attempt to put that progress in perspective by considering where we have been, where we are now, and where, I believe, we are ready and ought to go
Adults' Acquisition of Novel Dimension Words: Creating a Semantic Congruity Effect
The semantic congruity effect is exhibited when adults are asked to compare pairs of items from a series, and their response is faster when the direction of the comparison coincides with the location of the stimuli in the series. For example, people are faster at picking the bigger of 2 big items than the littler of 2 big items. In the 4 experiments presented, adults were taught new dimensional adjectives (mal/ler and borg/er). Characteristics of…
The dynamics of embodiment: A field theory of infant perseverative reaching
The overall goal of this target article is to demonstrate a mechanism for an embodied cognition. The particular vehicle is a much-studied, but still widely debated phenomenon seen in 7–12 month-old-infants. In Piaget's classic “A-not-B error,” infants who have successfully uncovered a toy at location “A” continue to reach to that location even after they watch the toy hidden in a nearby location “B.” Here, we question the traditional explanations…
Object name Learning Provides On-the-Job Training for Attention
By the age of 3, children easily learn to name new objects, extending new names for unfamiliar objects by similarity in shape. Two experiments tested the proposal that experience in learning object names tunes children's attention to the properties relevant for naming—in the present case, to the property of shape—and thus facilitates the learning of more object names. In Experiment 1, a 9-week longitudinal study, 17-month-old children who repeate…
Development as a dynamic system
Object name learning and object perception: A deficit in late talkers
Two experiments examined the relation between early object name learning and the ability to represent objects by their abstract shapes. In Experiment 1, two-year-old children with productive vocabularies in the bottom 20th percentile – ‘late talkers' – were compared with (1) same-age children with larger vocabularies, and (2) younger children matched for productive vocabulary, on their ability to recognize named common objects. Object categories …
Cognition as a dynamic system: Principles from embodiment
Priming overgeneralizations in two- and four-year-old children
Overgeneralization occurs when a child uses the wrong word to name an object and is often observed in the early stages of word learning. We develop a method to elicit overgeneralizations in the laboratory by priming children to say the names of objects perceptually similar to known and unknown target objects. Experiment 1 examined 18 two-year-old children's labelling of familiar and unfamiliar objects, using a name that was previously produced. E…
An attentional learning account of the shape bias: Reply to Cimpian and Markman (2005) and Booth, Waxman, and Huang (2005)
Recently, Developmental Psychology published 2 articles on the shape bias; both rejected the authors' previous proposals about the role of attentional learning in the development of a shape bias in object name learning. A. Cimpian and E. Markman (2005) did so by arguing that the shape bias does not exist but is an experimental artifact. A. E. Booth, S. R. Waxman, and Y. T. Huang (2005), in contrast, concluded that the shape bias (and its contextu…
Rapid Word Learning Under Uncertainty via Cross-Situational Statistics
There are an infinite number of possible word-to-word pairings in naturalistic learning environments. Previous proposals to solve this mapping problem have focused on linguistic, social, representational, and attentional constraints at a single moment. This article discusses a cross-situational learning strategy based on computing distributional statistics across words, across referents, and, most important, across the co-occurrences of words and…
Pronouns and verbs in adult speech to children: A corpus analysis
Assessing whether domain-general mechanisms could account for language acquisition requires determining whether statistical regularities among surface cues in child directed speech (CDS) are sufficient for inducing deep syntactic and semantic structure. This paper reports a case study on the relation between pronoun usage in CDS, on the one hand, and broad verb classes, on the other. A corpus analysis reveals statistical regularities in co-occurr…
When do children generalize the plural to novel nouns
Despite the theoretical importance of the processes of generalization to the development of morphological rules, not much is known about the basic developmental trend or the relevant processes. The present study seeks to answer the question: at what age are children able to generalize the plural to new nouns. In a six-week longitudinal study, children aged 17.5 to 28 months participated in a spontaneous production task in which they were either p…
Infants rapidly learn word-referent mappings via cross-situational statistics
What's in View for Toddlers? Using a Head Camera to Study Visual Experience
This article reports 2 experiments using a new method to study 18‐to 24‐month‐olds' visual experiences as they interact with objects. Experiment 1 presents evidence on the coupling of head and eye movements and thus the validity of the head camera view of the infant's visual field in the geometry of the task context. Experiment 2 demonstrates the use of this method in the naturalistic context of toy play with a parent. The results point to the em…
Knowing more than one can say: The early regular plural
This paper reports on partial knowledge in two-year-old children's learning of the regular English plural. In Experiments 1 and 2, children were presented with one kind and its label and then were either presented with two of that same kind (A→AA) or the initial picture next to a very different thing (A→AB). The children in A→AA rarely produced the plural. The children in A→AB supplied the singular form of A but children in A→AA did not. Experime…
Learning your language, outside-in and inside-out
Children learn how to learn language, and they get better as they go along. This article presents an overview of research inspired by a dynamic systems view of language learning that shows it to be a self-organizing process in which children create the units they need from the regularities present in the environment in which they are situated
Action as developmental process – a commentary on Iverson's ‘Developing language in a developing body: The relationship between motor development and language development’
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
An Embodied Account of Argument Structure Development
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:All information enters the cognitive system through the body. Thus, it is possible that the body—and its morphology—may play a role in structurng knowledge and acquisition. This idea is particularly cogent in the case of verbs, since early learned verbs are about bodily actions and since recent advanc-es in cognitive neuroscience (Pulvermueller, 2005; James and Maouene, 2009) indicate that the neura…
Psychology (48 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (34 works) · Cognitive psychology (32 works) · Linguistics (29 works) · Computer Science (25 works) · Developmental psychology (18 works) · Language Development and Disorders (17 works) · Artificial Intelligence (16 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (15 works) · Artificial Intelligence (14 works)