Biomedical subjects

M A Callanan

Publications and source records attributed to M A Callanan.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2001

Parents explain more often to boys than to girls during shared scientific thinking.

Young children's everyday scientific thinking often occurs in the context of parent-child interactions. In a study of naturally occurring family conversation, parents were three times more likely to explain science to boys than to girls while using interactive science exhibits in a museum. This difference in explanation occurred despite the fact that parents were equally likely to talk to their male and female children about how to use the exhibits and about the evidence generated by the exhibits. The findings suggest that parents engaged in informal science activities with their children may be unintentionally contributing to a gender gap in children's scientific literacy well before children encounter formal science instruction in grade school.

Chi-Square Distribution↗

PubMed1998

Metarepresentation in action: 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds' developing theories of mind in parent-child conversations.

Using a cross-sectional natural language database, the authors investigated the parent-child conversations of 36 three-, 4-, and 5-year-olds to explore 2 issues regarding the development of metarepresentation. First, children's uses of explicit contrastives (ECs)--utterances that explicitly contrast 2 differing mental states--were explored. Four-year-olds and, to a greater extent, 5-year-olds were found to reliably use ECs. Second, parents' responses to children's uses of "I don't know" and implicit contrastives (e.g., contradictions) were examined to determine whether parents took these opportunities to highlight the representational nature of mental states. All children regularly elicited mentalistic responses from their parents and, in some cases, these parental responses were positively related to children's production of mental talk. Findings are discussed in terms of how theory of mind development may be guided by scaffolding processes.

Child Development↗

PubMed1998

Labels and explanations in mother-child emotion talk: age and gender differentiation.

Mothers' and preschoolers' emotion talk was examined for age- (2, 3, and 4 years) and gender-related patterns in the use of labels and explanations. Although labels directly refer to emotions, explanations link emotion words to causal information. Children used emotion words mainly in labels. Boys' emotion talk showed an age increase; in contrast, the youngest group of girls talked about emotion much more frequently than did same-age boys, and this high frequency remained relatively stable across age. Mothers used more explanations than labels in emotion talk to boys but used similar amounts with girls. Further, their use of labels and explanations related to individual differences in the extent to which children talked about emotion. These findings are discussed in terms of language socialization--in particular, processes related to the socialization of emotion language and gender.

Affect↗

PubMed1997

Conversations with mothers and siblings: young children's semantic and conceptual development.

This study compared teaching and learning measures of 16 mother-child and sibling dyads playing a picture categorization game. Target children (mean age = 3 years 11 months) participated in 2 separate sessions, 1 with their mother and 1 with their older sibling (mean age = 6 years 11 months). Although siblings' teaching styles directed target children to make the correct choices, mothers provided information to help target children make choices on their own. Mothers labeled objects and categories more than siblings. Although target children scored higher with siblings than with mothers, this was because siblings categorized about half of the pictures themselves. Target children labeled objects and categories more with mothers than with siblings. These findings suggest important differences in how mothers and siblings interpreted the goals of the task, offering target children different teaching styles from which to learn.

Child↗

PubMed1995

Form-function correspondences in children's inference.

Perceptual similarity among concept members has been viewed as inadequate to motivate concept formation. Instead, it has been argued that intuitive beliefs about the world offer more structured motivation for concepts. Our research explores children's beliefs about the relations between perceptually based similarity among things and their predicted behaviors. We focus on form-function correspondences as fundamental components of very young children's belief systems. Groups of 2- and 4-year-old children were asked to choose which of 2 line-drawn animals evidenced a particular "function," a special behavior. Even the youngest children showed sensitivity to form-function correspondences by selecting the animal whose form afforded the particular function. A second study investigated how form-function correspondences affect the relative influences of perceptual similarity and shared labels over patterns of children's inference. Perceptual similarity, if "motivated" by intuitive beliefs about correspondences between form and function, was found to be sufficient basis for inference and a more robust basis than shared labels when children attributed meaningful functions to novel animal forms.

Animals↗

PubMed1994

Children's hypotheses about word meanings: is there a basic level constraint?

We tested the hypothesis that a basic level constraint guides preschool children's hypotheses about word meanings. In the first study, a puppet labeled pictures with novel words. Three-, four-, and five-year-olds then chose referents for the novel word from a set of pictures. A pretest allowed us to select three sets of items for each subject: items that were familiar at the subordinate and basic level (e.g., poodle-dog), items that were familiar at the basic level but not at the subordinate level (e.g., sedan-car), and items that were unfamiliar at both levels (e.g., manta-ray). Contrary to the basic level constraint hypothesis, children tended to interpret novel words (e.g., quadruped) at the basic level only for items where they already knew a basic level name. In a second study, using a simplified procedure, three- and four-year-olds again showed no bias toward basic level interpretations except when translation to familiar basic level words was possible. A third study controlled for the possibility that our use of multisyllabic words might have biased children against basic level interpretations; despite the use of single-syllable nonsense words, children in this study again did not favor basic level interpretations. In the final two studies, adults' ratings of picture similarity and children's judgments in a triad task confirmed that the differences in children's basic level biases could not be accounted for by differences in similarity across the item types. Taken together these results suggest that although other constraints on word meaning may be in place, preschoolers are flexible in interpreting new words at different hierarchical levels.

Child↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Learning words through overhearing.

Recent research indicates that toddlers can monitor others' conversations, raising the possibility that they can acquire vocabulary in this way. Three studies examined 2-year-olds' (N = 88) ability to learn novel words when overhearing these words used by others. Children aged 2,6 were equally good at learning novel words-both object labels and action verbs-when they were overhearers as when they were directly addressed. For younger 2-year-olds (2,1), this was true for object labels, but the results were less clear for verbs. The findings demonstrate that 2-year-olds can acquire novel words from overheard speech, and highlight the active role played by toddlers in vocabulary acquisition.

Age Factors↗