Medha Tare

Changing Museum Visitors’ Conceptions of Evolution

We examined whether a single visit to an evolution exhibition contributed to conceptual change in adult (n = 30), youth, and child (n = 34) museum visitors’ reasoning about evolution. The exhibition included seven current research projects in evolutionary science, each focused on a different organism. To frame this study, we integrated a developmental model of visitors’ understanding of evolution, which incorporates visitors’ intuitive beliefs, with a model of free-choice learning that includes personal, sociocultural, and contextual variables. Using pre- and post-measures, we assessed how visitors’ causal explanations about biological change, drawn from three reasoning patterns (evolutionary, intuitive, and creationist), were modified as a result of visiting the exhibition. Whatever their age, background beliefs, or prior intuitive reasoning patterns, visitors significantly increased their use of explanations from the evolutionary reasoning pattern across all measures and extended this reasoning across diverse organisms. Visitors also increased their use of one intuitive reasoning pattern, need-based (goal-directed) explanations, which, we argue, may be a step toward evolutionary reasoning. Nonetheless, visitors continued to use mixed reasoning (endorsing all three reasoning patterns) in explaining biological change. The personal, socio-cultural, and contextual variables were found to be related to these reasoning patterns in predictable ways. These findings are used to examine the structure of visitors’ reasoning patterns and those aspects of the exhibition that may have contributed to the gains in museum visitors’ understanding of evolution.

Can You Say It Another Way? Cognitive Factors in Bilingual Children's Pragmatic Language Skills

Pragmatic differentiation in bilinguals is the ability to use two languages appropriately with different speakers. Although some sensitivity emerges by 2 years, the effects of context on these skills and their relation to other developing metacognitive capacities have not been examined. The current study compared the language use of 28 bilingual children (aged 2;7 to 3;10 and 4;1 to 4;11) across two tasks. All children were bilingual in English and Marathi, an Indian language. Theory of mind measures were included to assess whether developing cognitive capacities relate to pragmatic language ability. Results indicated that pragmatic differentiation is not an all-or-none ability but one which develops during the preschool years and varies based on the conversational context. This development is also related to metacognitive abilities which emerge during this time.

Bilingual parents' modeling of pragmatic language use in multiparty interactions

Parental input represents an important source of language socialization. Particularly in bilingual contexts, parents may model pragmatic language use and metalinguistic strategies to highlight language differences. The present study examines multiparty interactions involving 28 bilingual English- and Marathi-speaking parent-child pairs in the presence of monolingual bystanders (childrens mean ages: 3;2 and 4;6). Their language use was analyzed during three sessions: parent and child alone, parent and child with the English speaker, and parent and child with the Marathi speaker. Parents demonstrated pragmatic differentiation by using relatively more of the bystanders language; however, children did not show this sensitivity. Further, parents used a variety of strategies to discuss language differences, such as providing and requesting translations; children translated most often in response to explicit requests. The results indicate that parents model pragmatic language differentiation as well as metalinguistic talk that may contribute to childrens metalinguistic awareness.

Non-native phonemic discrimination, phonological short term memory, and word learning

Abstract Accurately perceiving non-native speech sounds is known to be very difficult. Numerous studies provide strong and converging evidence that this difficulty varies systematically, depending on the properties of the non-native sounds and the native language of the listener. There is substantially less research on how phonetic and phonological structure relates to individual differences in the ability to perceive non-native phonemes, though individual differences in auditory abilities are well-documented. The present work reports two experiments aimed at elucidating the structure of individual differences in non-native speech perception and the relationship between these abilities, phonological short term memory, and early second language word learning. In Experiment 1, confirmatory factor analysis of discrimination data for nine non-native contrasts from different languages indicates that voicing and place (segmental) contrasts pattern together and distinct from tone (suprasegmental) contrasts. In Experiment 2, the results indicate that phonological short term memory and discrimination ability both predict word learning accuracy and that discrimination ability does so in a mostly feature-specific manner.