By Allie Conway, Teacher
At this year’s winter staff development day, Bing staff heard from two linguistics researchers about their ongoing projects at the nursery school. About 40 people were in attendance for the talks, which took place Feb. 9.
Lyle Lustigman, a postdoctoral fellow working with Stanford linguistics professor Eve Clark, PhD, is examining how children tell stories, and more specifically how they describe an event involving conversation. In her game room, where she conducts research at Bing, children watch short animated videos involving at least one conversation between characters. The child is then asked to describe to her what transpired in the videos. As the two discuss the video, Lustigman notes the extent of the child’s perspective-taking, particularly whether the child describes only events or whether the child mentions the conversation or the characters’ opinions.
Lustigman predicts that a child’s ability to understand the perspective of each participant in an event will develop with age. She explained her hypothesis: “Younger children will avoid reporting the conversation and stick to the activities in the event, while older children will recount the conversation in more detail.” In the examples Lustigman showed, a 3-year-old child did indeed focus on the video’s events: “The girl made a butterfly, but it just went out!” A child of almost 5 years old, however, included descriptors of characters’ opinions and words: “He thought they were dots, but the girl told him they were just bees.” Lustigman will analyze her findings along a continuum of children’s ages, and will also compare perspective-taking between children and adults. Lustigman is also interested in the emergence of complex sentences used to report thoughts and speech (“he thought, she said”) and hopes to conduct later research on that topic.
Masoud Jasbi is a fourth-year doctoral student in linguistics, also working with Clark. He is investigating the acquisition of presupposition words in children. Parts of our linguistic code called “presupposition triggers” refer to previously shared information. A few common presupposition triggers are “the,” “too” and “again.” The word “too” indicates that there is something other than the object of the sentence that shares its characteristics. Because this concept is so abstract, Jasbi is interested in determining at what point children begin to gather presupposition trigger information.
Jasbi’s study involves four poker chips. Two are blank, one is marked with an elephant, and one is marked with a frog. Jasbi scrambles the chips, chooses two, and asks the child to guess what they might be. This first guess should be random. Jasbi then looks at one chip and then the other as he asks one of the following questions: “Do we have an elephant?” “Do we have an elephant too?” or “Do we have an elephant and a frog?” He answers his own question with “yes” or “no” then asks the child once more to guess about his combination of chips. Asking the question “Do we have an elephant too?” strongly suggests to people with a grasp of presupposition words that there is already a frog present. So far, results suggest that the children correctly understand the clue given around the age of 4, and thus already have an understanding of presupposition triggers.
We are grateful to both researchers for sharing their insights with the staff, and look forward to learning more as their research progresses.