University of California, San Diego
The Department of Psychology is Honored
to Present a Talk by
Maureen Callanan
Unversity of California, Santa Cruz
"Parent-Child Conversations as a Context for Early Cognitive Development"
Presented on May 13, 2004
Location: The Crick Conference Room
Mandler Hall, room 3545
- About the Speaker:
- Maureen Callanan's research focuses on cognitive and language
development in toddler and preschool children, exploring how children
come to understand the world through everyday conversations with their
parents.
One particular focus is on how children learn word meanings and understand multiple names for the same objects. Callanan's research examines parents' strategies for labeling objects and children's use of these strategies in interpreting new words. The studies have demonstrated important links between children's expectations and parents' labeling strategies.
Callanan has also focused on how children's theories about the world (e.g., how heat makes things melt, what makes people sad) develop within parent-child conversations. Children's "why" questions and parents' explanations are studied through parent's diary reports of children's questions and through videotapes of parent-child activities like reading books, baking muffins and visiting children's museums. The research explores how children and parents construct shared understandings of concepts and of causal theories about particular domains, including scientific and interpersonal domains.
