DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY

Research Interests

As a developmental scientist, I consider human development, across ages and across cultures. Adopting a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, I focus on infants’ and young children’s concepts, words, and reasoning. I am also dedicated to building bridges across traditional disciplinary boundaries to focus on pressing issues facing young children and their families.

How (and how early) do infants link language and cognition? In my primary research lab, the Infant and Child Development Center, we consider the acquisition of two fundamental human capacities -- conceptual development and language development -- and the relation between them in infants and toddlers. We focus on these capacities throughout the first two years of life, beginning with infants as young as 3 months of age. Adopting a cross-linguistic developmental perspective, our research involves infants and young children acquiring a range of different languages, including English, Mandarin, Korean, Spanish, French and Italian. We show that even before infants begin to speak, their language and cognitive advances are powerfully linked.

How do young children reason about the natural world? In this arena, we examine the role of culture and associated epistemological orientations in the development of knowledge and reasoning about the natural world. Adopting a cross-cultural developmental approach, we consider how children learn about the natural world. What does it mean to be alive? What is the relation between humans and other living things? Together with colleagues at Northwestern, the National Research Council of Argentina (CONICET) and in Native communities in the US, we examine learning in very young children from Native American and non-Native communities. We have shown that cultural differences in how we view the relation between humans and other living things is manifest not only in our knowledge and reasoning, but also in our practices and beliefs about what it means to be alive. 

For fuller descriptions of my lab and developmental science at Northwestern, please see these links:

Infant and Child Development Center (Waxman infant lab) 

Institute for Innovations in Developmental Sciences (DevSci) 

Harnessing the Power of Development to Improve Lives: Healthier, Earlier 

Institute for Policy Research

Selected Recent Publications

Infant language and cognition

Waxman, S. R. (2021). Racial awareness and bias begin early: Developmental entrypoints, challenges and a call to action. Perspectives on Psychological Science,16(5), 893-902. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916211026968  

Novack, M. A., Brentari, Diane, Goldin-Meadow, S., & Waxman, S. (2021). Sign language, like spoken language, promotes object categorization in young hearing infants. Cognition, 215, 104845. 

Woodruff Carr, K., Perszyk, D. R., Norton, E. S., Voss, J. L., Poeppel, D., & Waxman, S. R. (2021). Developmental changes in auditory-evoked neural activity underlie infants’ links between language and cognition. Developmental Science.  

Luchkina, E., & Waxman, S. (2021) Semantic priming supports infants’ ability to learn names of unseen objects. PLOS ONE 16(1): e0244968. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244968 

Woodruff Carr, K., Perszyk, D. R., & Waxman, S. R. (2021). Birdsong fails to support object categorization in human infants. PLOS ONE 16(3): e0247430. 

LaTourrette, A. & Waxman, S., (2020). Naming guides how 12-month-old infants encode and remember objects. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 202006608. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2006608117 

Taverna, A. & Waxman, S. R. (2020). Early lexical acquisition in the Wichi language. Journal of Child Language, 1-21. 

LaTourrette, A. & Waxman, S. R. (2019). Defining the role of language in infants’ object categorization with eye-tracking paradigms. Journal of Visualized Experiments, (144), e59291.    

Perszyk, D. & Waxman, S. R. (2019). Infants’ advances in speech perception shape their earliest links between language and cognition. Scientific Reports, 9:3293.  

Syrett, K., LaTourrette, A., Ferguson, B., & Waxman, S. R. (2019). Crying helps, but being sad doesn't: Infants constrain nominal reference using known verbs, not known adjectives. Cognition, 193, 104033.  

Ferguson, B., Franconeri, S., & Waxman, S. (2018). Very young infants learn abstract rules in the visual modality. PLoS ONE, 13(1), e0190185.  

LaTourrette, A. & Waxman, S. (2018). A little labeling goes a long way: Semi-supervised learning in infancy. Developmental Science. Published in volume 2019, 22(1), e12736.  

Perszyk, D. R., & Waxman, S. R. (2018). Linking language and cognition in infancy. Annual Review of Psychology, 69, 231-250.  

 

Reasoning about the natural world

Waxman, S., Herrmann, P., Woodring, J., & Medin, D. (2016). Humans (really) are animals: Picture-book reading influences five-year-old urban children’s construal of the relation between humans and non-human animals. In J. S. Horst & C. Houston-Price (Eds). An open book: What and how young children learn from picture and story books. Lausanne: Frontiers Media. doi: 10.3389/978-2-88919-728-6.

Taverna, A., D. Medin, and S. Waxman. 2016. "Inhabitants of the earth": Reasoning about folkbiological concepts in Wichi children and adults. Early Education and Development. doi: 10.1080/10409289.2016.1168228.

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