Past Projects

Mechanisms Supporting Experience-Driven Changes in Semantic Knowledge

Entities in the world are related by many overlapping, predictive, and mutually constraining relations and features. For example, almost all animals - but not tools - have eyes and breathe, while only a subset of animals are likely to be encountered in a farm context. While it is theorized that children encode these relations among entities in the world, a lack of methods appropriate for studying semantic structure in young children has made it challenging to examine changes in semantic structure with experience and learning during several key developmental periods, including the preschool years and transition into formal schooling. To address this lack of methods, this research project developed and validated developmentally-appropriate methods to study semantic structure in young children, including methods supporting remote data collection with children. Using these methods, this research project tested theoretically-driven predictions about the learning mechanisms that support changes in semantic structure. For example, the patterns of mutually-constraining relations described above would more strongly support the differentiation of broad across-domain distinctions (e.g., animals versus tools) relative to finer-grained within-domain distinctions (e.g., farm animals). Both in laboratory studies and in real-world contexts (i.e., a summer camp at a local botanical garden), this project provided evidence consistent with the idea that children capitalize on patterns of covariation among relations and features of the entities in the world to build organized semantic representations. This work not only directly informs theories of semantic structure, but also suggests that academic achievement differences may stem (at least in part) from lack of access to learning opportunities (such as out-of-school enrichment programs) to build initial knowledge in academic-relevant domains. Overall, this project provided the research community with new methods of studying semantic networks in children and new insights into the importance of enrichment experiences for semantic development. (Award Number 1918259).