FOR 2253:  Crossing the Borders: The Interplay of Language, Cognition, and the Brain in Early Human Development

• Subject Area: Humanities ; Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: from 2015 to 2024
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 258522519

During the first years of life, children develop important abilities and acquire essential knowledge in several domains, like language, cognition, and social cognition. These competencies have a fundamental impact on lifelong cognitive outcomes, and their development seems to be at least partially tied to sensitive periods in early childhood (e.g., Knudsen, 2004; Kuhl, 2011).The last decades of developmental science are characterized by a fast growing body of research using a large spectrum of experimental methods and providing fascinating insights into the early developmental trajectories of human beings. However, research on early development is typically performed in separate scientific disciplines. The planned Research Unit aims at integrating experts from psychology, linguistics, and developmental neuroscience to establish a systematic interdisciplinary research program to study the interplay of language, cognition, and socio-cognitive abilities in early development. The first aim of the Research Unit is to investigate the fundamentals of prominent developmental changes that occur in children¿s behavior during the first years of life. One example for such a change is the transition from being a universal perceiver to becoming an experience-driven perceiver. Another example is the transition of the infant as a highly efficient statistical learner to a learner who is more restricted in these learning capacities. The second aim of the Research Unit is to study the underlying mechanisms of striking parallels that occur in the developmental course of language and cognition. Examples are infants¿ ability to segment continuous streams of events into single units, understand the causal relations in events, or process adjacent and non-adjacent structures in both heard language and observed actions. These processes and their development are mostly studied separately in linguistics or cognitive psychology. By taking an interdisciplinary perspective, more of such parallels may be identified, and the driving developmental factors can be investigated in terms of domain-general or domain-specific processes and their underlying neural mechanism. The Research Unit provides an integrated look at early human development by studying the interaction of the growing competencies in nonlinguistic, linguistic, and social-cognitive domains, the maturation of the neuro-cognitive system, and the role of general cognitive functions.

• DFG Programme: Research Units

Projects

• Coordination Funds (Applicant Höhle, Barbara )
• Cross-domain influences on early word and action learning (Applicants Elsner, Birgit ;  Mani, Nivedita )
• From associative to controlled learning of non-adjacent dependencies - brain function and structure (Applicants Friederici, Angela ;  Höhle, Barbara ;  Männel, Claudia ;  Wartenburger, Isabell )
• Speech and face processing beyond perceptual narrowing: Domain-general vs. domain-specific mechanisms in attunement and its modification (Applicants Höhle, Barbara ;  Schwarzer, Gudrun )
• The interplay of bottom-up and top-down processes in the segmentation of speech and action (Applicants Elsner, Birgit ;  Wartenburger, Isabell )
• The Role of Language in Early Theory of Mind Development (Applicant Sodian, Beate )
• The scope and development of implicit Theory of Mind: The interplay of cognition, language, and the brain (Applicants Grosse Wiesmann, Charlotte ;  Liszkowski, Ulf ;  Rakoczy, Johannes )
• Understanding structures of different complexity in language and action: Parallels in development and neurocognitive processing across domains (Applicants Altvater-Mackensen, Ph.D., Nicole ;  Paulus, Markus )

• Spokesperson: Professorin Dr. Barbara Höhle