Laura Lakusta

Montclair State University · Department of Psychology

In order to talk about mechanical support (e.g., girl adheres a picture to a box), children must not only represent the relevant components (actor, action, figure, spatial relation, ground) but also map them onto linguistic structures (e.g., NP, VP, NP, PP). Although research has explored how children linguistically encode states of mechanical supp...

To talk about mechanical support (e.g., taping picture on wall), children must represent relevant components (e.g., agent, action, support mechanism, etc.), and map them into the linguistic structure. Although by 2 years, children acquire the ‘Basic Locative Construction’ (BE on, in English) to encode support from below (e.g., cup IS ON a table), l...

Infants reason about support configurations (e.g., teddy on table) and young children talk about a variety of support relations, including support-from-below (e.g., apple on table) and many other types (e.g., Band-Aid on leg, picture on wall). Given this wide variation in support types, we ask whether early differentiation of the semantic space of...

Research has found that children begin to differentiate in the terms they use to encode support. In English, BE on, the Basic Locative Construction (Levinson & Wilkins, 2006; “put on” in dynamic events) tends to encode support-from-below (e.g., cup on table), whereas lexical support verbs (e.g,, hang, stick, tape, glue, etc.) tend to encode mechani...

This chapter reviews the benefits of servant leadership and introduces a Servant Leadership Oriented model of Leadership Development (SLO-LD) based on the Center for Creative Leadership’s (CCL) Assess, Challenge, and Support (ACS) model of leadership development. Our model aims to blend the tenets of an SLO-LD model with the original ACS model. We...

Although children acquire spatial language for basic spatial relations (e.g., cup ON table) by age two, relatively little is known regarding how children learn to talk about mechanical support (e.g., objects attached via tape, glue, etc.). How do children acquire mechanical support language? Given that explanations 1) often refer to unobserved func...

Stahl & Feigenson (2017) report findings that surprise may foster word learning. Surprising events, which violate expectations of core knowledge about objects (e.g., continuity) and their properties, lead children to learn novel words better than expected events. In a previous study, we adopted the same method to test whether surprise plays a role...

We examine if young children can learn about the grammaticality of specific spatial verbs following a learning phase. We use a method from Lakusta et al., (2019), and Levin's (1993) analysis by focusing on two classes of spatial verbs. Our results are compatible with current theories of verb learning, specifically syntactic bootstrapping and struct...

What do children understand about adhesion (e.g., toy stuck to box)? And how do children explain inconsistent adhesion events? Twenty preschool children were shown videos of object A adhering to object B or not, followed by an event depicting object A acting consistent or inconsistent with the initial event. Then questioned about why these inconsis...

Spatial terms that encode support (e.g., “on”, in English) are among the first to be understood by children across languages (e.g., Bloom, 1973; Johnston & Slobin, 1979). Such terms apply to a wide variety of support configurations, including Support-From-Below (SFB; cup on table) and Mechanical Support, such as stamps on envelopes, coats on hooks,...

Support (one object preventing another from falling) is linguistically encoded by adults and children in a highly structured and differentiated way, with basic locative expressions or Light verbs (e.g., in English, the block is on/put on the box) encoding Support-from-Below, and lexical verbs (e.g., she stuck the block on the box) encoding Mechanic...

Configurations of support include those that exhibit Support-From-Below (cup on table), as well as those involving Mechanical Support (e.g., stamp on envelope, coat on hook). Mature language users show a “division of labor” in the encoding of support, frequently using basic locative expressions (BE on in English) to encode Support-From-Below but le...

This research was presented at Montclair State’s student research symposium.

This is a poster used for a presentation given at Montclair State University's student research symposium

This project was both led and presented by Julia Hauss. Several of our colleagues also helped author the work.

This research was presented at Montclair State’s student research symposium.

We explored the nature of infants’ concepts for goal path and source path in motion events (e.g., the duck moved into the bowl/out of the bowl), specifically asking how infants’ representations could support the acquisition of the semantic roles of goal path and source path in language. The results showed that 14.5-month-old infants categorized goa...

Farese, S., Howard, D., Lawrie, M., Spinelli, D., Lakusta, L. (2017). 18 month old categorization. – Poster presented at the Montclair State University Student Research Symposium, April 2017.

Infants represent objects that are endpoints in motion events and show a preference for encoding the endpoint (the duck waddles into a bowl) over the starting point (the duck waddles out of a box). This asymmetry continues to appear in nonlinguistic cognition and language throughout development. This study tests whether this asymmetry also shows up...

Previous studies have shown a robust bias to express the goal path over the source path when describing events ("the bird flew into the pitcher," rather than "… out of the bucket into the pitcher"). Motivated by linguistic theory, this study manipulated the causal structure of events (specifically, making the source cause the motion of the figure)...

Across languages and event types (agentive and non-agentive motion, transfer, change of state, attach/detach), goal paths are privileged over source paths in the linguistic encoding of events. Furthermore, some linguistic analyses suggest that goal paths are more central than source paths in the semantic and syntactic structure of motion verbs. How...

When people describe motion events, their path expressions are biased toward inclusion of goal paths (e.g., into the house) and omission of source paths (e.g., out of the house). In this paper, we explored whether this asymmetry has its origins in people's non-linguistic representations of events. In three experiments, 4-year-old children and adult...

People with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) process visual information in a manner that is distinct from typically developing individuals. They may be less sensitive to people's goals and, more generally, focus on visual details instead of the entire scene. To examine these differences, people with and without ASD were asked to detect changes in dy...

The current study explored causal language in 3.5- to 4-year-old children by manipulating the type of agent (human acting intentionally or unintentionally, or inanimate object) and the type of effect (motion or state change) in causal events. Experiment 1 found that the type of agent, but not the type of effect, influenced children's production of...

The capacity to reorient in one's environment is a fundamental part of the spatial cognitive systems of both humans and nonhuman species. Abundant literature has shown that human adults and toddlers, rats, chicks, and fish accomplish reorientation through the construction and use of geometric representations of surrounding layouts, including the le...

We review growing evidence that the reorientation system-shared by both humans and nonhuman species-privileges geometric representations of space and exhibits many of the characteristic features of modular systems. We also review evidence showing that humans can move beyond the limits of nonhuman species by using two cultural constructions, languag...

How do infants represent objects, actions, and relations in events? In this review, we discuss an approach to studying this question that begins with linguistic theory-specifically, semantic structures in language. On the basis of recent research exploring infant cognition and prominent linguistic analyses, we examine whether infants' representatio...

Four experiments investigated infants' preferences for age-appropriate and age-inappropriate infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Two initial experiments showed that 6-, 10-, and 14-month-olds preferred IDS directed toward younger infants, and 4-, 8-, 10-, and 14-month-olds, but not 6-month-olds, preferred IDS directed tow...

We explored the pre-linguistic foundations of spatial language by testing how 12‐month-old infants represent sources and goals in Motion events (e.g., a duck moving out of a bowl and onto a block). Abundant evidence suggests that sources and goals are represented asymmetrically in languages, with goals taking a more prominent role than sources. We...

We explored the linguistic encoding of Paths in children between the ages of three and seven, in children with Williams syndrome, and in normal adults, focusing specifically on Source and Goal Paths. The results showed an asymmetry, with Goal Paths regularly and systematically encoded, but Source Paths often omitted. This pattern occurred among all...

The present experiments investigate how young language learners begin to acquire form-based categories and the relationships between them. We investigated this question by exposing 12-month-olds to auditory structure of the form aX and bY (infants had to learn that a-elements grouped with Xs and not Ys). Infants were then tested on strings from the...

It has been claimed that in the language systems of people with Williams syndrome (WS), syntax is intact but lexical memory is impaired. Evidence has come from past tense elicitation tasks with a small number of participants where individuals with WS are said to have a specific deficit in forming irregular past tenses. However, typically developing...

In this chapter, we explore the nature of spatial language and how it engages non-linguistic spatial representational systems. We ask to what degree and in what way spatial language depends on non-linguistic spatial representation for development, and to what degree it can emerge autonomously. We focus on spatial language in people with Williams sy...