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Maria D. SeraProfessor Office: 208C Child Development Cognitive and linguistic development |
The focus of my research is the investigation of cognitive and linguistic development through several features of the Spanish language that differ from English (see the Language and Cognitive Development Laboratory). Through study of language-specific distinctions, I hope to provide new information about the role of language in children's classification and other cognitive skills.
In one set of studies, my colleagues and I explored Spanish children's acquisition of ser and estar, the two forms of the Spanish verb “to be.” In their use of these verbs, Spanish speakers, unlike in English, distinctively classify a condition as permanent or temporary. Experiments include English- and Spanish-speaking children's and adults' uses of defining and characteristic features, and the conceptual status of properties consistently described with ser or estar.
In a second area, we are studying the Spanish noun-gender system that requires speakers to classify all nouns as masculine or feminine. Goals of this work are to compare developing classification skills between English and Spanish speakers, and to explore the underlying cognitive distinctions captured by linguistic differences. Other work in the lab focuses on the role of language in cognition in speakers of English.
If you are interested in the relation of language and cognitive development to education you may want to explore the Minnesota Interdisciplinary Training in Education Research (MITER) program in which I am also a faculty member.
Recent publications
Martin, A. J. & Sera, M. D. (in press) The Acquisition of Spatial Constructions in ASL and English. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education.
Sera, M. D. & Martin, A. J. (in press) Developmental Relationships Between Language and Cognition. Chapter to appear in E. Lieven (Ed.) Language Development. Elsevier Press.
Kuo, J. Y. & Sera, M. (2004) Classifier Effects on Human Categorization. In Proceedings of the 15th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics, Yen-Hwei Lin (Editor), University of Southern California Press, pp. 182-202.
Sera, M., Elieff, C., Forbes, J., Burch, M. Rodríguez, W., Poulin-Dubois, D. (2002) When Language Affects Cognition and When it Does Not: An Analysis of Grammatical Gender and Classification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 131(3), 377-397.
Manning, C., Sera, M., & Pick, H.(2002). Understanding how we talk about space: An examination of the meaning of English spatial prepositions. In K.R. Coventry and P. Oliver (Ed.) Spatial Language: Cognitive and Computational Perspectives, pp. 147-164. Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer Academic Publishers.