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Updated June 2006

 

Dr. Douglas A. Behrend

Department Chair
Experimental Training Program

Email: dbehrend@uark.edu

Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 1986
B.A., Kalamazoo College, 1981

 

I am a developmental psychologist interested in the cognitive and language development of young children from one to six years of age. Most of my research has investigated questions of the child’s acquisition of knowledge about the world and the role of language in the acquisition and expression of that knowledge. In this regard, I have two current primary programs of research.

Early Word Learning: For many years I have been interested in the strategies that children use that enable them to learn a new word quickly and effortlessly upon minimal exposure to that word. I have focused on the learning of verbs (Behrend, 1990; Behrend, 1995; Behrend, Cartwright, & Harris; 1995) and, more recently, have turned my attention to children’s learning of nouns (Behrend, Scofield, & Kleinknecht, 2001; Scofield & Behrend, 2002). In these more recent studies, my students and I have been investigating the differences between young children’s learning of a name for a novel object versus learning some other factual information about that object. We have demonstrated that although children as young as 2 years of age can learn and remember a novel name (e.g., “koba”) and a novel fact (e.g., “My cat stepped on this.”) about an unfamiliar object equally well, children do not treat these types of information equally. Specifically, children as young as 2 will extend a newly learned word to additional members of the same category as the novel object much more frequently than they will extend a newly learned fact to those category members, and that this happens immediately upon the learning of the new word (Behrend et al, 2001). In another study, we have examined differences between words and facts in the disambiguation effect (Scofield & Behrend, 2002). The disambiguation effect occurs when a child maps a novel word onto an unfamiliar object rather than to a familiar object. Our results show that the disambiguation effect is specific to the learning of a novel word, and not due to any general pragmatic principle such as conventionality or informativeness. That is, children as young as two were more likely to assign the novel word to the unfamiliar object than to assign a novel fact to an unfamiliar object, and this was true regardless of what information the child new about the familiar object (i.e. its name or a fact about it). We argue that these results demonstrate that words participate in privileged forms of learning and generalization that cannot be explained by domain-general processes.

Language and Early Understanding of Intentionality: In another line of research, my students, colleagues, and I have been studying the role of language—specifically the role of verbs—in one- and two-year-olds’ interpretations of the behavior of others as being intentional. A number of studies over the past several years have shown that children as young as 18-months (or even younger!) take the intentional stance; that is, they interpret the behaviors of others as intentional and stemming from some internal, mental state. For example, when Meltzoff (1995) showed 18-month-olds an unsuccessful action, children were more likely to produce the intended, successful action than simply imitate the unsuccessful action that they saw. We reasoned, however, that if an action was labeled by the actor (e.g. “I am meeking.”), then that might imply that an action was intended, even if that action looked unusual or unsuccessful Using the behavioral re-enactment paradigm developed by Meltzoff, Angelika Wittek and I have demonstrated that, in fact, 18- to 30-month old children are more likely to produce the unsuccessful action than the presumed intended action when the experimenter labels that action with a novel verb (Behrend & Wittek, 2002). We conclude that language is a unique form of information that even very young children can use to make determinations about the intentionality of another’s behavior. Current studies in this program of research are investigating the role of language in children’s understanding of accidental behaviors and of pretense.

Representative Publications:

Behrend, D.A., & Wittek, A. (2002). Verbs, actions, and intentionality. Paper Presented at the International Conference on Infant Studies, Toronto, CA.

Behrend, D.A., Scofield, J., & Kleinknecht, E.E. (2001). Beyond Fast Mapping: Young Children's Extensions of Novel Words and Novel Facts, Developmental Psychology, 37, 698-705.

Behrend, D. A. (1995). Processes involved in the initial mapping of verb meanings. In M. Tomasello & W. Merriman (Eds.), Beyond names for things: Children's acquisition of verbs (pp. 251-273). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Behrend, D. A., Harris, L. L., & Cartwright, K. B. (1995). Morphological cues to verb meaning: Inflections and the initial mapping of verb meanings. Journal of Child Language, 22, 89-106.

Behrend, D. A. (1990). The development of verb concepts: Children's use of verbs to label familiar and novel events. Child Development, 61, 681-696.

Behrend, D. A. (1990). Constraints and development: A reply to Nelson (1988). Cognitive Development, 5, 313-330.

 

 

                             

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