New research opportunities in psycholinguistics

Professor Stephen Crain

The arrival of Macquarie University’s third Federation Fellow provides additional opportunities for postgraduate students to become involved in some highly interesting research.

Internationally renowned psycholinguist Professor Stephen Crain, has joined the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science (MACCS) from the University of Maryland and is on the lookout for research students.

Crain was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Federation Fellowship in 2004 to continue his research at Macquarie University. His project is titled Logic and language: foundations of cognitive growth, investigating children’s competence in using language from a biological perspective. The project will also design and develop a child-friendly, non-invasive functional brain imaging facility and investigate the early development of logic and language in children.

In his previous research, Crain has developed experimental tools to study children's knowledge about language. He is interested in properties that are in common to all languages, as well as the ways in which languages differ.

“The question is how much children bring to the task of language acquisition – how much do they know innately, as part of human biology, versus how much they learn from their environment. It’s the nature versus nurture issue,” Crain says.

For example, he has already conducted experiments with young children to investigate how logical expressions such as ‘and’ and ‘or’ are learned in English and other languages such as Chinese and Japanese.

In English adults understand ‘or’ is used to mean ‘this one, or this one, or possibly both’, whereas in the same contexts, the equivalent word ‘ka’ is understood by adults to mean ‘this one, or this one, but not both’. However Crain has demonstrated that children learning Japanese understand 'ka' as having the English meaning of  'or', even though in adult Japanese this word has a different interpretation.

“The source of the common interpretation of ‘or’ in children across these different languages could reside in human biology, such that children's brains are structured at an early age to adopt this interpretation,” he says.

At Macquarie University Crain will be using a new brain imaging technology known as magnetoencephalography, or MEG, to see if children process language in the same way that adults process language. He will be collaborating with a number of other scientists from all over Australia to establish the country’s first MEG laboratory at Macquarie. Researchers will be able to study language processing in the brain in normal and in special populations, such as autism, dyslexia and specific language impairment.

For further information contact Professor Crain via e-mail: stephen.crain@mq.edu.au

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