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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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