image: “SHAPE: The system of shape representations in cognition, development and across languages,” encompasses the way that shape figures into the learning of 44 different languages — systematically sampled to represent all languages across the globe — in children with typical and atypical developmental trajectories, as well as in deaf individuals using sign language.
Credit: Linda Smith
An international team of six researchers, including Indiana University Distinguished Professor Linda Smith, received a $10.9 million European Research Council Synergy Grant to pursue a bold and diverse six-year interdisciplinary project at the intersection of language, cognition and human development. Pivotal to all three is the unifying concept of shape.
Shape perception, as Smith’s work has shown, is critical to a toddler’s ability to learn language. In their earliest and tentative forays into language, young children are able to name a few objects common to their environment. Soon, however, the pace at which they learn words accelerates vastly with a perceptual ability that Smith calls “shape bias.”
Recognizing shape helps children learn how to learn words much more quickly. In this way, she said, shape is central to language acquisition, and to both being and becoming human.
Smith, a faculty member in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at IU Bloomington, is an internationally recognized cognitive scientist whose research centers on developmental processes and mechanisms of change in young children. Her work seeks to understand early motor development, language acquisition and visual shape processing.
The international team’s new project, “SHAPE: The system of shape representations in cognition, development and across languages,” encompasses the way that shape figures into the learning of 44 different languages — systematically sampled to represent all languages across the globe — in children with typical and atypical developmental trajectories, as well as in deaf individuals using sign language.
Drawing on their combined expertise, the team aims to expand understanding of the principles — and principled variations — in how developmental trajectories differ across languages, as well as how languages themselves vary in their representations of shape.
“The abstract properties of shape are codified in the world’s varied languages, both spoken and signed,” Smith said. “And we know languages differ dramatically in how they embed shape, whether in verbs, object names or prepositions.”
The researchers propose that shape is key to understanding human intelligence and its developmental trajectories. It can also provide new understandings of how to support children with atypical developmental trajectories. The project thus aims to develop a cross-disciplinary theory of the dynamic interaction of language and cognitive systems in which shape plays a pivotal role.
“If you know that children in one country become fully functioning adults by developing a different way, maybe you can use that knowledge,” Smith said. “Maybe we will see that you don’t have to go from ‘a’ to ‘b’ to ‘c’ to ‘d,’ if you observe that other cultures take a different pathway.”
The project will proceed according to six “work packages,” which begin by looking at how shape is codified in the 44 chosen languages. The researchers will then design batteries of tasks for adults and children in these languages to trace both the developmental pathways and the way shape informs both visual perception and the language itself. At each location, on-the-ground experts in every language will help the researchers implement their studies and ensure that their methods are culturally sensitive.
“We have studies of U.S. and Japanese children that we’ll do longitudinally; children with autism in Norway and the U.S.; children with developmental language disorder in Norway and the U.S. that we’ll study deeply,” Smith said. “But with all languages, we’ll test 5- to 7-year-old children using the same tasks as adults, with the idea of determining when the adult differences show up and whether we see differences between children of different cultures early on, whether they are already on a path distinct to their own language and culture.”
The European Research Council Synergy Grant is part of the European Union's research and innovation program, Horizon Europe. Its mission is to support small groups of outstanding researchers working across disciplines to push the frontiers of knowledge. The researchers’ combined expertise includes vision research, child development, language and cognition, sign language, and neuro-diverse populations, including autism and developmental language disorder, in four European countries and the USA.
“The thing that is really exciting to me is the collaborative process,” Smith said. “We’ve been meeting for two years to put this grant together, and I have to say I’ve loved every minute of it. It has been a true growth experience, because we’re so used to doing things in our own little enclave.”
Other researchers include Mila Vulchanova in the Department of Language and Literature in the Norwegian University of Science and Technology; Pamela Perniss in the Faculty of Human Sciences at the University of Cologne, Germany; Frank Seifart of the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, France; Larissa Samuelson in the School of Psychology at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom; and Caroline Larson in the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences at the University of Missouri, Columbia.