Sandra R Waxman
Biographic Data
| ID | 648888 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sandra R Waxman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sandra R |
| FAMILY NAME | Waxman |
| SIGNATURE | WAXMAN S R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5009-2068 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 98 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 39 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
How pervasive is joint attention? Mother‐child dyads from a Wichi community reveal a different form of “togetherness”
Talking About the Absent and the Abstract
Human language permits us to call to mind objects, events, and ideas that we cannot witness directly, either because they are absent or because they have no physical form (e.g., people we have not met, concepts like justice). What enables language to transmit such knowledge? We propose that a referential link between words, referents, and mental representations of those referents is key. This link enables us to form, access, and modify mental rep…
The link between non-human primate vocalizations and cognition is not constrained by maturation alone
Sparse labels, no problems
Labeling promotes infants' object categorization even when labels are rare. By 2 years, infants engage in “semi-supervised learning” (SSL), integrating labeled and unlabeled exemplars to learn categories. However, everyday learning contexts pose substantial challenges for infants' SSL. Here, two studies (n = 74, 51% female, 62% non-Hispanic White, 18% multiracial, 8% Asian, 6% Black, Mage = 27.3 months, collected 2018–2020) implemented a familiar…
Hands on
Parent-child communication is a rich, multimodal process. Substantial research has documented the communicative strategies in certain (predominantly White) United States families, yet we know little about these communicative strategies in Native American families. The current study addresses that gap by documenting the verbal and nonverbal behaviors used by parents and their 4-year-old children ( N = 39, 25 boys) across two communities: Menominee…
Racial Awareness and Bias Begin Early
Overt expressions of racial intolerance have surged precipitously. The dramatic uptick in hate crimes and hate speech is not lost on young children. But how, and how early, do children become aware of racial bias? And when do their own views of themselves and others become infused with racial bias? This article opens with a brief overview of the existing experimental evidence documenting developmental entry points of racial bias in infants and yo…
An Object Lesson
Despite the seemingly simple mapping between adjectives and perceptual properties (e.g., color, texture), preschool children have difficulty establishing the appropriate extension of novel adjectives. When children hear a novel adjective applied to an individual object, they successfully extend the adjective to other members of the same object category but have difficulty extending it more broadly to members of different categories. We propose th…
Sign language, like spoken language, promotes object categorization in young hearing infants
Tracing culture in children’s thinking
There is considerable agreement that cognitive development is shaped by culture. Less clear, however, is the mechanism by which culture exerts its influence as cognition unfolds. Prior work has primarily focused on culture as a species-specific medium of cognitive development or as an explicative factor of cognitive capacities. Here we describe a more recent alternative, the culture-as-ecosystem approach. In this view, concepts are embedded withi…
Two-year-olds consolidate verb meanings during a nap
Early lexical acquisition in the Wichi language
This research brings new evidence on early lexical acquisition in Wichi, an under-studied indigenous language in which verbs occupy a privileged position in the input and in conjunction with nouns are characterized by a complex and rich morphology. Focusing on infants ranging from one- to three-year-olds, we analyzed the parental report of infants’ vocabulary (Study 1) and naturalistic speech samples of children and their caregivers (Study 2). Re…
Studying the Real-Time Interpretation of Novel Noun and Verb Meanings in Young Children
Decades of research show that children rely on the linguistic context in which novel words occur to infer their meanings. However, because learning in these studies was assessed after children had heard numerous occurrences of a novel word in informative linguistic contexts, it is impossible to determine how much exposure would be needed for a child to learn from such information. This study investigated the speed with which French 20-month-olds …
Linking language and categorization in infancy
Language exerts a powerful influence on our concepts. We review evidence documenting the developmental origins of a precocious link between language and object categories in very young infants. This collection of studies documents a cascading process in which early links between language and cognition provide the foundation for later, more precise ones. We propose that, early in life, language promotes categorization at least in part through its …
A Collaborative Approach to Infant Research
The ideal of scientific progress is that we accumulate measurements and integrate these into theory, but recent discussion of replicability issues has cast doubt on whether psychological research conforms to this model. Developmental research—especially with infant participants—also has discipline‐specific replicability challenges, including small samples and limited measurement methods. Inspired by collaborative replication efforts in cognitive …
Abandoning the ‘theoretical apartheid’ between nature and nurture
In Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge, Bloch tells the intertwining tales of two protagonists – psychology and anthropology (Bloch 2012). With a keen eye for historical and intellectual trends, he identifies political and intellectual tensions that have hampered both fields. Arguing convincingly for abandoning the old ‘theoretical apartheid’ between nature and culture (in anthropology), which runs parallel to the pernicious theoretical tens…
Naming the Living Things
This work focuses on the underlying conceptual structure of children’s category of living things from a cross-cultural, cross-linguistic perspective. School-aged children ( n = 129) from three Argentinean communities (rural Wichí-speaking, rural Spanish-speaking, urban Spanish-speaking) were asked to generate the names of living things. Analyses were focused on the typicality, semantic organization, and hierarchical level of the names mentioned. …
Commentary on special section
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…
Shall we blick?”
By 14 months, infants have become exquisite observers of others' behavior and successful word learners. But do they coordinate their early observational and language capacities to gain insight into the intentions of others? Building upon Gergely, Bekkering, and Király's (2002) classic head-touch phenomenon, we consider the contribution of language to 14-month-old infants' imitation of an unconventional behavior (turning on a light with one's fore…
Core Folkbiological Concepts
We examine two core folk-biological concepts (e.g., animate, living thing, where small capital letters denote concepts; quotation marks denote their names; italics denote languagespecific names) in adults and children from the Wich community, an indigenous group of Amerindians living in the Chaco forest in north Argentina. We provide an overview of the Wich community, describing in brief their interaction with objects and events in the natural wo…
Cultural Differences in Children’s Ecological Reasoning and Psychological Closeness to Nature
In spite of evidence for cultural variation in adult concepts of the biological world (i.e., folkbiological thought), research regarding the influence of culture on children's concepts is mixed, and cultural influences on many aspects of early folkbiological thought remain underexplored. Previous research has shown that there are cultural differences in ecological reasoning and psychological closeness to nature between Menominee Native American a…
Maya Folk Botany and Knowledge Devolution
One potential source of folkbiological knowledge loss is changing patterns of interaction with the natural world stemming from “modernizing” material change. This article compares models of plant knowledge among age‐matched groups of children and adults in two communities of a municipality located in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. Use of the Cultural Consensus Model (CCM), analysis of residual agreement, and examination of model content show t…
What's in the input? Frequent frames in child-directed speech offer distributional cues to grammatical categories in Spanish and English
Recent analyses have revealed that child-directed speech contains distributional regularities that could, in principle, support young children's discovery of distinct grammatical categories (noun, verb, adjective). In particular, a distributional unit known as the frequent frame appears to be especially informative (Mintz, 2003). However, analyses have focused almost exclusively on the distributional information available in English. Because lang…
Naming the Animals that Come to Mind
This article considers the semantic structure of the animal category from a cross-cultural developmental perspective. Children and adults from three North American communities (urban majority culture, rural majority culture and rural Native American) were prompted to generate animal names, and the resulting lists were analyzed for their underlying dimensionality and for the typicality or salience of specific animal names. The semantic structure o…
Language and Experience Influence Children's Biological Induction
Children's reasoning about biological concepts is influenced not only by their experiences in the natural world and in their classrooms, but also by the way that these concepts are named. In English, 'animal' can refer either to (a) exclusively non-human animals, or (b) all animate beings (human and non-human animals). In Indonesian, this category of animate beings has no dedicated name. Here, we ask whether this difference in naming has conseque…
Names will never hurt me? Naming and the development of racial and gender categories in preschool‐aged children
For children as well as adults, object categories (e.g., dog, animal, car, vehicle) serve as a rich base for inductive inferences. Here, we examine children's inferences regarding categories of people. We showed 4‐year‐old children a picture of an individual (e.g., a white woman), taught them a novel property of the individual (e.g., is good at a new game called zaggit), and examined children's projections of that property to other individuals. E…
Folkbiological reasoning from a cross-cultural developmental perspective
In 2 experiments, the authors examined the evolution of folkbiological reasoning in children (4 to 10 years of age) and adults from 4 distinct communities (rural Native American, rural majority culture, and suburban and urban North American communities). Using an adoption paradigm, they examined participants' intuitions regarding the inheritance of properties and the mechanisms underlying the transmission of kindhood. Across all communities and a…
Object names and object functions serve as cues to categories for infants
Can object names and functions act as cues to categories for infants? In Study 1, 14- and 18-month-old infants were shown novel category exemplars along with a function, a name, or no cues. Infants were then asked to "find another one," choosing between 2 novel objects (1 from the familiar category and the other not). Infants at both ages were more likely to select the category match in the function than in the no-cue condition. However, only at …
The role of comparison in the extension of novel adjectives
Previous reseach has documented that basic-level object categories provide an initial foundation for mapping adjectives to object properties. Children ranging from 21 months to 3 years can successfully extend a novel adjective (e.g., transparent) to other objects sharing a salient property if the objects are all members of the same basic-level category; if the objects are members of different basic-level categories, they fail to extend adjectives…
Relations among word meanings in early lexical development
When deriving the meanings of individual words, children must also discern the relations among words. To ascertain how children interpret such relations, we taught twelve 2-year-olds novel count nouns for related but unfamiliar objects. Although we never specified the relations among words, children's interpretation of the relations was mediated by the similarity of the objects. For dissimilar objects, children interpreted the words as mutually e…
Setters and samoyeds
Basic level categories are a rich source of inductive inference for children and adults. These 3 experiments examine how preschool-age children partition their inductively rich basic level categories to form subordinate level categories and whether these have inductive potential. Children were taught a novel property about an individual member of a familiar basic level category (e.g., a collie). Then, children's extensions of that property to oth…
Challenging the notion of a thematic preference in young children
Many researchers have argued that early cognitive development is characterized by a conceptual preference for thematic over taxonomic relations. However, more recent research indicates that infants and toddlers may not favor thematic relations. To resolve this discrepancy, the conceptual preferences of children ranging from 2 to 4 years of age were examined, using a forced-choice task including a target (e.g., a carrot), a thematic alternative (e…
Names will never hurt me? Naming and the development of racial and gender categories in preschool‐aged children
For children as well as adults, object categories (e.g., dog, animal, car, vehicle) serve as a rich base for inductive inferences. Here, we examine children's inferences regarding categories of people. We showed 4‐year‐old children a picture of an individual (e.g., a white woman), taught them a novel property of the individual (e.g., is good at a new game called zaggit), and examined children's projections of that property to other individuals. E…
Conceptual Information Permeates Word Learning in Infancy
Three experiments document that conceptual knowledge influences lexical acquisition in infancy. A novel target object was initially labeled with a novel word. In both yes-no (Experiment 1) and forced-choice (Experiment 2) tasks, 2-year-olds' subsequent extensions were mediated by the conceptual description of the targets. When targets were described as artifacts, infants extended on the basis of shape. When targets were described as animates, inf…
The development of an appreciation of specific linkages between linguistic and conceptual organization
Commentary on special section
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…
Core Folkbiological Concepts
We examine two core folk-biological concepts (e.g., animate, living thing, where small capital letters denote concepts; quotation marks denote their names; italics denote languagespecific names) in adults and children from the Wich community, an indigenous group of Amerindians living in the Chaco forest in north Argentina. We provide an overview of the Wich community, describing in brief their interaction with objects and events in the natural wo…
Cultural Differences in Children’s Ecological Reasoning and Psychological Closeness to Nature
In spite of evidence for cultural variation in adult concepts of the biological world (i.e., folkbiological thought), research regarding the influence of culture on children's concepts is mixed, and cultural influences on many aspects of early folkbiological thought remain underexplored. Previous research has shown that there are cultural differences in ecological reasoning and psychological closeness to nature between Menominee Native American a…
Maya Folk Botany and Knowledge Devolution
One potential source of folkbiological knowledge loss is changing patterns of interaction with the natural world stemming from “modernizing” material change. This article compares models of plant knowledge among age‐matched groups of children and adults in two communities of a municipality located in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. Use of the Cultural Consensus Model (CCM), analysis of residual agreement, and examination of model content show t…
Naming the Animals that Come to Mind
This article considers the semantic structure of the animal category from a cross-cultural developmental perspective. Children and adults from three North American communities (urban majority culture, rural majority culture and rural Native American) were prompted to generate animal names, and the resulting lists were analyzed for their underlying dimensionality and for the typicality or salience of specific animal names. The semantic structure o…
Hands on
Parent-child communication is a rich, multimodal process. Substantial research has documented the communicative strategies in certain (predominantly White) United States families, yet we know little about these communicative strategies in Native American families. The current study addresses that gap by documenting the verbal and nonverbal behaviors used by parents and their 4-year-old children ( N = 39, 25 boys) across two communities: Menominee…
Shall we blick?”
By 14 months, infants have become exquisite observers of others' behavior and successful word learners. But do they coordinate their early observational and language capacities to gain insight into the intentions of others? Building upon Gergely, Bekkering, and Király's (2002) classic head-touch phenomenon, we consider the contribution of language to 14-month-old infants' imitation of an unconventional behavior (turning on a light with one's fore…
Language and Experience Influence Children's Biological Induction
Children's reasoning about biological concepts is influenced not only by their experiences in the natural world and in their classrooms, but also by the way that these concepts are named. In English, 'animal' can refer either to (a) exclusively non-human animals, or (b) all animate beings (human and non-human animals). In Indonesian, this category of animate beings has no dedicated name. Here, we ask whether this difference in naming has conseque…
Beyond the basics
Although preschoolers typically accept the basic level label for an object (e.g. dog ) and tend to resist all others (e.g. collie , animal ), this tendency is not inviolable. Under certain circumstances, children accept more than one label per object. In this experiment, with 20 three- and 20 four-year-old children, we extended this body of research in three ways. We examined (1) children's production of multiple, hierarchically related labels; (…
Relations among word meanings in early lexical development
When deriving the meanings of individual words, children must also discern the relations among words. To ascertain how children interpret such relations, we taught twelve 2-year-olds novel count nouns for related but unfamiliar objects. Although we never specified the relations among words, children's interpretation of the relations was mediated by the similarity of the objects. For dissimilar objects, children interpreted the words as mutually e…
The development of an appreciation of specific linkages between linguistic and conceptual organization
Words as Invitations to Form Categories
Setters and samoyeds
Basic level categories are a rich source of inductive inference for children and adults. These 3 experiments examine how preschool-age children partition their inductively rich basic level categories to form subordinate level categories and whether these have inductive potential. Children were taught a novel property about an individual member of a familiar basic level category (e.g., a collie). Then, children's extensions of that property to oth…
Challenging the notion of a thematic preference in young children
Many researchers have argued that early cognitive development is characterized by a conceptual preference for thematic over taxonomic relations. However, more recent research indicates that infants and toddlers may not favor thematic relations. To resolve this discrepancy, the conceptual preferences of children ranging from 2 to 4 years of age were examined, using a forced-choice task including a target (e.g., a carrot), a thematic alternative (e…
Object naming at multiple hierarchical levels
According to the storage hypothesis (Kail & Leonard, 1986), word-finding deficits in young children are not the direct result of deficient retrieval strategies; they are a manifestation of a general delay in language development that affects lexical storage. In the current study, we explored one aspect of lexical storage, the hierarchical organization of the semantic system, in 13 preschoolers with word-finding deficits (WF) and 13 preschoolers w…
The role of comparison in the extension of novel adjectives
Previous reseach has documented that basic-level object categories provide an initial foundation for mapping adjectives to object properties. Children ranging from 21 months to 3 years can successfully extend a novel adjective (e.g., transparent) to other objects sharing a salient property if the objects are all members of the same basic-level category; if the objects are members of different basic-level categories, they fail to extend adjectives…
Patterns of spontaneous production of novel words and gestures within an experimental setting in children ages 1;6 and 2;2
This study presents an analysis of children's spontaneous production of words and gestures during an experimental symbol learning task. Namy & Waxman (1998) previously reported that children aged 1;6 interpreted novel arbitrary words (e.g. blicket) and manual gestures (e.g. a dropping motion) as names for object categories (e.g. fruit) but that at 2;2, children interpreted words as names more readily than gestures. Based on this finding and other…
Object names and object functions serve as cues to categories for infants
Can object names and functions act as cues to categories for infants? In Study 1, 14- and 18-month-old infants were shown novel category exemplars along with a function, a name, or no cues. Infants were then asked to "find another one," choosing between 2 novel objects (1 from the familiar category and the other not). Infants at both ages were more likely to select the category match in the function than in the no-cue condition. However, only at …
Conceptual Information Permeates Word Learning in Infancy
Three experiments document that conceptual knowledge influences lexical acquisition in infancy. A novel target object was initially labeled with a novel word. In both yes-no (Experiment 1) and forced-choice (Experiment 2) tasks, 2-year-olds' subsequent extensions were mediated by the conceptual description of the targets. When targets were described as artifacts, infants extended on the basis of shape. When targets were described as animates, inf…
Déjà vu all over again
The authors assert that L. B. Smith and L. Samuelson's (2006) most recent critique of A. E. Booth, S. R. Waxman, and Y. T. Huang's (2005) work missed its mark, deflecting attention from the important theoretical difference between the two sets of authors' positions and focusing instead on imagined differences and minor expositional complaints. The authors' goal in this response is twofold. First, they aim to redirect attention to the 1 clear diff…
Experience and Cultural Models Matter
This paper builds on Hatano and Inagaki’s pioneering work on the role of experience and cultural models in children’s biological reasoning. We use a category-based induction task to consider how experience and cultural models shape rural and urban children’s patterns of biological reasoning. We discuss the implications of these findings for developmental theory and educational practice
Folkbiological reasoning from a cross-cultural developmental perspective
In 2 experiments, the authors examined the evolution of folkbiological reasoning in children (4 to 10 years of age) and adults from 4 distinct communities (rural Native American, rural majority culture, and suburban and urban North American communities). Using an adoption paradigm, they examined participants' intuitions regarding the inheritance of properties and the mechanisms underlying the transmission of kindhood. Across all communities and a…
What's in the input? Frequent frames in child-directed speech offer distributional cues to grammatical categories in Spanish and English
Recent analyses have revealed that child-directed speech contains distributional regularities that could, in principle, support young children's discovery of distinct grammatical categories (noun, verb, adjective). In particular, a distributional unit known as the frequent frame appears to be especially informative (Mintz, 2003). However, analyses have focused almost exclusively on the distributional information available in English. Because lang…
Naming the Animals that Come to Mind
This article considers the semantic structure of the animal category from a cross-cultural developmental perspective. Children and adults from three North American communities (urban majority culture, rural majority culture and rural Native American) were prompted to generate animal names, and the resulting lists were analyzed for their underlying dimensionality and for the typicality or salience of specific animal names. The semantic structure o…
Language and Experience Influence Children's Biological Induction
Children's reasoning about biological concepts is influenced not only by their experiences in the natural world and in their classrooms, but also by the way that these concepts are named. In English, 'animal' can refer either to (a) exclusively non-human animals, or (b) all animate beings (human and non-human animals). In Indonesian, this category of animate beings has no dedicated name. Here, we ask whether this difference in naming has conseque…
Names will never hurt me? Naming and the development of racial and gender categories in preschool‐aged children
For children as well as adults, object categories (e.g., dog, animal, car, vehicle) serve as a rich base for inductive inferences. Here, we examine children's inferences regarding categories of people. We showed 4‐year‐old children a picture of an individual (e.g., a white woman), taught them a novel property of the individual (e.g., is good at a new game called zaggit), and examined children's projections of that property to other individuals. E…
Maya Folk Botany and Knowledge Devolution
One potential source of folkbiological knowledge loss is changing patterns of interaction with the natural world stemming from “modernizing” material change. This article compares models of plant knowledge among age‐matched groups of children and adults in two communities of a municipality located in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. Use of the Cultural Consensus Model (CCM), analysis of residual agreement, and examination of model content show t…
Core Folkbiological Concepts
We examine two core folk-biological concepts (e.g., animate, living thing, where small capital letters denote concepts; quotation marks denote their names; italics denote languagespecific names) in adults and children from the Wich community, an indigenous group of Amerindians living in the Chaco forest in north Argentina. We provide an overview of the Wich community, describing in brief their interaction with objects and events in the natural wo…
Cultural Differences in Children’s Ecological Reasoning and Psychological Closeness to Nature
In spite of evidence for cultural variation in adult concepts of the biological world (i.e., folkbiological thought), research regarding the influence of culture on children's concepts is mixed, and cultural influences on many aspects of early folkbiological thought remain underexplored. Previous research has shown that there are cultural differences in ecological reasoning and psychological closeness to nature between Menominee Native American a…
Commentary on special section
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…
Shall we blick?”
By 14 months, infants have become exquisite observers of others' behavior and successful word learners. But do they coordinate their early observational and language capacities to gain insight into the intentions of others? Building upon Gergely, Bekkering, and Király's (2002) classic head-touch phenomenon, we consider the contribution of language to 14-month-old infants' imitation of an unconventional behavior (turning on a light with one's fore…
Naming the Living Things
This work focuses on the underlying conceptual structure of children’s category of living things from a cross-cultural, cross-linguistic perspective. School-aged children ( n = 129) from three Argentinean communities (rural Wichí-speaking, rural Spanish-speaking, urban Spanish-speaking) were asked to generate the names of living things. Analyses were focused on the typicality, semantic organization, and hierarchical level of the names mentioned. …
Abandoning the ‘theoretical apartheid’ between nature and nurture
In Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge, Bloch tells the intertwining tales of two protagonists – psychology and anthropology (Bloch 2012). With a keen eye for historical and intellectual trends, he identifies political and intellectual tensions that have hampered both fields. Arguing convincingly for abandoning the old ‘theoretical apartheid’ between nature and culture (in anthropology), which runs parallel to the pernicious theoretical tens…
Psychology (37 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (33 works) · Developmental psychology (25 works) · Linguistics (25 works) · Cognitive psychology (23 works) · Social Psychology (17 works) · Language Development and Disorders (16 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Noun (10 works)