"Science Live!" Workshop on the Acquisition of Recursion across Languages; Holland - July, 2015

University Of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst MA

Investigators

Abstract

This project will organize a series of workshops that will culminate in a museum exhibit on children's acquisition of recursion in grammar. The exhibit will be presented as part of the Science Live! program at the NEMO Science Museum in Amsterdam in summer 2015, and later will be shared with other museums and schools in the U.S. and abroad. The goal is to educate museum-goers about research by having them participate in on-going data collection as well as demonstrations and learning experiences on the topic of the research. Recursion is the process of "putting something inside itself," much like Russian dolls within dolls within dolls. Recursive routines are commonly found in computer programs and are the basis for learning the number system--creating the series of n, (n+1), ((n+1) +1), etc. In a generative grammar, it is the mechanism by which small meaningful units are recombined into an unlimited variety of larger structures. All languages have the basic form of recursion, while other forms vary from language to language. For example, few languages allow recursive possessive phrases the way English does, illustrated by a 3-year-old who said: "You are my Mom's Mom." The recursive process of putting a possessive inside a possessive could, in principle, continue indefinitely. Despite its importance, surprisingly little is understood about how and when the specific recursive structures found in various languages are acquired. The goal of the proposed exhibit is to use the principles of hands-on, informal learning to translate the abstract concept of recursion into concrete experiences for people of many different ages and backgrounds. The experiments which are the heart of this project provide engaging activities using hands-on apps on an iPad through which subtle aspects of children's understanding of the meanings and limits of recursive structures can be explored. The simplicity and flexibility of the iPad protocol permit the researcher to test a variety of structures across a wide range of ages, and ask further, at what level of abstraction learners generalize. Through the exhibit, the investigators will gather experimental evidence from museum-goers to test their hypotheses; the demonstrations that follow the actual experiments will engage children and their caregivers in challenges similar to those given to children around the world by colleagues in Japan, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and among indigenous peoples in Brazil, and will help them understand this fundamental dimension of what makes us human. By emphasizing the abstractness of representations required for all human languages, the project will work to counteract negative stereotypes about so-called 'primitive' languages, sometimes claimed to lack the fundamental property of recursion.