{"id":59,"date":"2014-12-01T05:55:46","date_gmt":"2014-12-01T05:55:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.timewords.com\/?page_id=59"},"modified":"2016-10-03T05:41:17","modified_gmt":"2016-10-03T05:41:17","slug":"projects","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.timewords.com\/?page_id=59","title":{"rendered":"Projects"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><strong>Time words<\/strong><\/div>\n<div>Several of my studies ask\u00a0how children learn words that refer to the domain of time, like \u201cminute\u201d and \u201cyesterday.\u201d Kids begin to say time words when they\u2019re only 2 or 3 years old, but they make many humorous\u00a0errors, and don\u2019t seem to interpret\u00a0time words in an adult-like way until several\u00a0years later. So what do kids think these words mean, when they say them early on?\u00a0Our findings suggest that preschoolers know a lot\u00a0about time words: they know minutes are longer than seconds, and they know last year was before yesterday. But they don&#8217;t know <em>how much<\/em> longer minutes are, how <em>how much<\/em> farther away last year was. These patterns can teach us what kinds of information children use to learn early meanings\u00a0and how time\u00a0concepts are structured.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<p><\/p>\n<div><strong>Space &#038; time<\/strong><\/div>\n<div>Even though we don\u2019t ever describe the past as being on our left side, English-speaking\u00a0adults often think about time as a horizontal line, with earlier or past events on the left and later or future ones on the right. The &#8220;mental timeline&#8221;\u00a0is reversed in speakers of languages that are read from right-to-left. I\u2019m interested in when, how, and why children begin to conceive of time as a linear path with a particular direction. Are we predisposed to use a spatial framework to organize our experiences? Does this rely on experience with reading and writing and using spatial tools like calendars? How quickly do culture-specific space-time associations develop, and how is their development related to learning temporal language? My studies investigate how children interpret and use conventional\u00a0timelines, and\u00a0whether children use &#8220;mental timelines&#8221; spontaneously.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<p><\/p>\n<div><strong>Cross-linguistic variation<\/strong><\/div>\n<div>Languages vary widely in how they express abstract concepts like time. In English, for instance, we change verbs to indicate whether actions happened in the past, present, or future. However, some\u00a0languages, like Chinese, don&#8217;t have a morphological tense system at all. Others, like Zulu, have multiple tenses within the past or future, indicating different distances from the present. So you&#8217;d use one form of the verb\u00a0to talk about things that happened yesterday, and another to talk about things that happened longer ago. Language also vary in the types of time words they have. In Urdu, there is a single word that indicates &#8220;one day from now,&#8221; in either the past or future. Does this linguistic diversity affect how we think about time? Does it change\u00a0how and when children acquire different types of time concepts? I&#8217;m conducting cross-cultural studies to find out!<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<div><strong>Temporal gestures<\/strong><\/div>\n<div>When adults talk about time, we often use our hands to help communicate what we\u2019re trying to say. For instance, we might gesture over our shoulder, or point over to the left, when we talk about the past in English. We usually don\u2019t even notice we\u2019re doing this, but if you pay attention to this when listening to someone else, you\u2019ll see it. This is yet another way that adults use space to represent time. But what about kids, who are still learning to communicate about time in words? Do they also use space in this way? Could temporal gestures actually help them learn temporal language? My colleagues\u00a0and I are cataloging the types of gestures children make while talking about time, and looking for connections between gesture patterns, temporal language comprehension, and kids&#8217; ability to use spatial timelines.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<p><\/p>\n<div><strong>Object perception<\/strong><\/div>\n<div>Seeing a familiar object and naming it, or seeing a familiar word and reading it, seems effortless to adults. Explaining these abilities, and their developmental origins, however, is an enormous challenge. My early work asked how the visual system detects visual features and integrates them into a recognizable percept, like an object, word, or face. In work published in <em>Nature Neuroscience<\/em>, I synthesized the literature on a failure of object recognition called <em>crowding<\/em>, to propose a universal law characterizing the boundaries of visual space in which object recognition is possible. This work also produced key insights into word-recognition, allowing us to isolate three distinct cognitive mechanisms underlying reading, and to describe the perceptual limits on reading rate.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Time words Several of my studies ask\u00a0how children learn words that refer to the domain of time, like&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":20,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-59","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","content-wrap"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/PaXhwV-X","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timewords.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/59","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timewords.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timewords.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timewords.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timewords.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.timewords.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/59\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":182,"href":"http:\/\/www.timewords.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/59\/revisions\/182"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timewords.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/20"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timewords.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}