Abstracts:

Children and Chimpanzees:
Understanding and Sharing Intentions
Michael Tomasello
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig

We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only especially powerful forms of intention-reading and cultural learning, but also a unique motivation to share psychological states with others and unique forms of cognitive representation for doing so. The result of participating in these activities is species-unique forms of cultural cognition. Support for this proposal is provided by systematic reviews of empirical research with human children (including those with autism) and great apes.

Universal Grammar, Statistics, or Both?
Charles Yang
Yale University

Recent demonstrations of statistical learning in infants have reinvigorated the innateness versus learning debate in language acquisition. This talk addresses these issues from both computational and developmental perspectives. First, we show that statistical learning using transitional probabilities cannot reliably segment words when scaled to a realistic setting (e.g. child-directed English). To be successful, it must be constrained by knowledge of phonological structure. Then, turning to the bona fide theory of innateness ? Chomsky's Principles and Parameters framework ? we argue that a full explanation of children’s grammar development must abandon the domain-specific learning model of triggering, in favor of probabilistic learning mechanisms that might be domain-general but nevertheless operate in the domain-specific space of syntactic parameters.

Anticipatory Representation of Natural Scenes
Helene Intraub
UD Psychology

The environment is continuous, but sensory input is not. Eye movements deliver a succession of views over time: as do hand movements (in the absence of vision). How does a coherent representation of space emerge based upon these discrete inputs? I will argue that the spatiotemporal character of perceiving is reflected in the mental representation of natural scenes. The representation frequently includes the unseen but highly expected layout not present in the studied view, but expected to exist just outside its borders (boundary extension; Intraub & Richardson, 1989). Research demonstrating the generality of this effect in memory for: a) 2D photographs, b) imagined scenes, c) regions of 3D scenes explored visually or haptically, and d) regions of 3D scenes explored by a deaf and blind "haptic expert" will be presented. The special status of view-boundaries and the processes they apparently elicit will be considered in the context of research on the representation of occluded objects, and research on the impact of planned eye fixations on memory. Although in one sense anticipatory representation of unexplored layout is a memory "error," it may actually play an important role in scene perception by facilitating integration of successive views and supporting a coherent representation of a continuous world that can be perceived only a part at a time.

Spatial Categories in Language and Thought
Anna Papafragou
UD Psychology

Language communities differ in their stock of reference frames (coordinate systems to reference locations and directions). English typically uses egocentrically-defined axes ("left-right"). Other languages like Tseltal lack such a system but use geocentrically-defined axes ("north-south"). Several researchers have recently argued that the lexical resources for encoding frames of reference determine the availability or salience of spatial concepts: in support of such language-on-thought effects, a series of experiments has shown that Tseltal speakers do not use a left-right coordinate system to solve spatial tasks (Brown and Levinson, 1993; Levinson 2003). Here I present the results of a collaborative project which re-examined spatial reasoning in Tseltal Mayan speakers using a battery of novel tasks. Contrary to previous studies, our data show that Tseltal speakers are quite capable of solving "egocentric" problems, despite the absence of a left-right coordinate system in their language. Furthermore, participants were often better on the egocentric than the geocentric version of our tasks. Taken together, our results strongly suggest that the linguistic encoding of spatial relations does not determine speakers' performance in nonlinguistic spatial tasks.

Starting at the end: The importance of goals in spatial language and spatial cognition
Barbara Landau
Johns Hopkins

A hallmark of human cognition is our capacity to talk about what we see. How is this accomplished? Given that language and spatial representations are likely to have quite different kinds of structures, the challenge is to understand how such apparently different systems of knowledge map onto each other, and how these mappings are learned. In my talk, I will discuss this problem with respect to the language of events, including manner of motion, change of possession, attachment/detachment, and change of state events. I will focus on evidence from normally developing children and children with Williams syndrome, a rare genetic deficit that gives rise to an unusual cognitive profile of profoundly impaired spatial representations together with spared language. The evidence shows that a fundamental property of event semantics an asymmetry between source and goal expressions is a pervasive fact about the linguistic description of events. Ancillary evidence suggests that this asymmetry is probably also a part of our non-linguistic representations, providing a partial solution to the problem of mapping dissimilar domains onto each other.

Acting Knowingly Versus Intentionally
Fred Adams & Annie Steadman
UD Philosophy

There are two basic theories of intentional action. View I (Adams, 1986; McCann, 1986), or the Simple View, holds that an agent (S) intentionally performs an action (A) only if S intends to do A. View II (Bratman, 1987; Harman, 1976; Mele, 1992) holds that there are cases in which S does A intentionally without intending to do A. In two earlier papers (Adams & Steadman 2004a, 2004b), We responded to recent empirical studies conducted by Joshua Knobe (of Princeton) that seem to suggest that the core concept of the layperson is in line with View II. We doubt that these results prove that the folk core concept of intentional action goes against the Simple View. Even if the folk do indeed possess an articulated core concept of intentional action (something that has yet to be proven), we feel that Knobe’s surveys are not accessing it. Instead, we argue that Knobe’s subjects are answering the survey questions in accordance with their understanding of the pragmatic implications of intentional language, particularly as it is used to indicate blame.

How Do Children Learn to Talk?
Roberta Golinkoff
UD Education

By the end of the first year of life, babies might say a word or two. By the end of the second year, many are talking in sentences!  How is language learned so quickly? This talk present some highlights of language development as well as work from my lab on how children learn verbs.  Without verbs, sentences could not describe events or relations.  Verbs are the architectural centerpiece of the sentence, allowing us to say who did what to whom.  Yet there is a paradox surrounding verb learning.  While children have some verbs in their earliest vocabularies, verbs are very difficult for children to learn.  What is this verb learning paradox about?

A Partial Hemispheric Disconnection
Mike McCloskey
Johns Hopkins University

Patient WS suffered corpus callosum damage as a consequence of stroke, causing a partial disconnection between hemispheres.  I describe  studies in which the partial disconnection was used as a tool for exploring interaction between hemispheres, and hemispheric  specialization.

Why do babies perceive horses as humans, but not humans as horses?
Paul Quinn
UD Psychology

This talk will present behavioral, computational, and electrophysiological data examining young infants¹ categorization of humans and nonhuman animals. The evidence indicates that young infants¹ representations for nonhuman animal species are basic-level in their exclusivity, structured by summary-level information, anchored by part information, and formed on-line during the course of an experiment. In contrast, young infants¹ representation for humans is global in its exclusivity, based on exemplar information, configured by holistic-gestalt information, and constructed at least in part on the basis of previous experience. The findings suggest that young infants may represent humans at an expert level, and imply more generally that perceptual expertise can occur early in development with sufficient experience. The presentation will conclude with some thoughts about what role a human expert representation might play in the acquisition and organization of knowledge by infants.

U-Shaped Learning May Be Necessary
John Case
UD CIS

U-shaped learning in human cognitive development involves learning, unlearning, and relearning. It occurs, e.g., in learning irregular verbs. The prior cognitive science literature is occupied with how humans do it, e.g., general rules vs. tables of exceptions. Our work is concerned instead with whether such learning behavior may be NECESSARY for learning collections of tasks required for human evolutionary success. It is, of course, hard to know about that. We present some very recent theorems of relevance within the paradigm of formal, Gold-style computational learning theory [Jain, Osherson, Royer, Sharma: Systems that Learn, 2nd ed, MIT Press, 1999]. These theorems show that, in subtle but reasonable senses which will be described in the talk, there are (mathematically constructed) learnable classes of tasks which provably REQUIRE U-shaped learning. What humans need to learn MAY be like these classes.

This is joint work with Lorenzo Carlucci, Sanjay Jain, and Frank Stephan.

What deaf children tell us about the relation of language to Theory of Mind
Peter de Villiers
Smith College

Recent work has suggested a significant role of language acquisition in the development of a mature Theory of Mind. Deaf children provide an important opportunity to test rival theories, especially language-delayed oral deaf children. However, language plays a variety of roles, and this talk will explore which aspects of Theory of Mind happen without language involvement, and which aspects may require language. Important contrasts are drawn with the case of childhood autism.

Meeting the challenge of dialect-neutral language assessments 
Jill de Villiers and Peter de Villiers 
Smith College

In this talk we will review the goal and our progress towards developing language assessments in the areas of morphosyntax, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics that are not biased against children who speak dialects of English such as African American English. We choose a couple of examples to illustrate the reasoning, the development, and the outcomes of the DELV tests, and the implications of the data gathered in the process for research and assessment.

Language and Theory of Mind: the Frontiers
Jill de Villiers
Smith College

In this discussion, we will discuss our recent thinking on the relationship of language and Theory of Mind. Which aspects of Theory of Mind development are conceptual, and which aspects might require language first? What role(s) does language play? Does Theory of Mind play a reciprocal role in feeding language skills, and if so, when and how?