Language acquisition and joint attention

Skilton, Amalia, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program and SBE's Documenting Endangered Languages program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Patience Epps at the University of Texas at Austin, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist studying how young children develop the ability to direct others' attention. While the development of joint attention behaviors in U.S. children learning English is well understood, joint attention development in other cultures has gone almost unstudied. This gap leaves a key question unanswered: do children learn joint attention behaviors from adults, or are they innate? Adult joint attention behaviors, such as pointing and use of demonstrative words like "this" and "that", vary massively across cultures. If children's joint attention behaviors are learned, they should reflect this diversity. If they are innate, they should be uniform, even between children living in radically different cultures. The researchers will test these competing theoretical predictions through a comprehensive study of language and joint attention development in children who belong to the Ticuna ethnic group. The research team will combine observational and experimental methods, including (1) collecting daylong audio recordings of children, made with wearable devices; (2) gathering video recordings of task-oriented communication between children and of child-caregiver interaction; and (3) conducting eye-tracking experiments. Through analyses of this data, the project will transform knowledge of language development in indigenous communities both directly, by producing documentation and analysis of children's acquisition of Ticuna, and at a disciplinary level, by creating new methods for integrating first language acquisition research into general language documentation projects. The researchers also anticipate broader impacts in education. In other NSF-funded research, U.S. language revitalization practitioners have identified an urgent need for studies of first language acquisition in indigenous settings. Results of this project may therefore inform the design and evaluation of programs which aim to create new first language speakers of Native American languages in the U.S. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.