Callier Center of Dallas
      
 
 

Research Overview

The research in our lab spans across the interactions of three different areas: language acquisition, neuroimaging, and development. In language acquisition, our main focus is how children acquire verbs, looking at both the semantic and grammatical aspects that develop in verb acquisition. In electrophysiology we focus primarily on using Event Related Potentials, or ERPs, to study neurological processes that correlated with cognitive processing in children and adults. In terms of development we investigate how various populations differ in terms of neurological processing across a lifespan. Dr. Mandy Maguire currently run the Developmental Neurolinguistics Laboratory at the Callier Center for Communication Disorders and the Electrophysiology laboratory at the Center for Brain Health.

LANGUAGE

How do we learn language?

Have you ever wondered how children are able to learn language so effortlessly while adults can struggle for decades and never master a language? Dr. Mandy Maguire of the Developmental Neurolinguistic Lab is trying to answer these questions. The areas of research cover questions like: do they know when to follow the correct grammatical rules even for words they have never heard before, how do children learn the meanings of abstracts nouns (freedom) and verbs (love) and how are relationships between words, like dog and leash, different for children compared to adults.

Current Studies:

Learning grammar: To use language appropriately children have to learn all of the rules that go along with it. When do children really understand rules to how language works, such as making a new verb like “blicking” past tense by removing “ing” and adding “ ed”? Children are very bad at correctly answering these questions verbally, but researchers have long suspected that they know more than they can tell us. By comparing brainwaves when children hear grammatically correcting (“Yesterday she blicked to the store”) and grammatically incorrect sentences (“Yesterday she blick to the store”) we can determine at what age children comprehend the grammatical rules that are the foundation of language. The goal is to track this in normally developing children so it can become a marker to help diagnosis possible language delays.

Word meanings: How do words go together? In adults, distinct areas of the brain have been identified as processing specific types of information (tools, animals, houses). How is this similar or different in children? By recording brainwaves as children hear pairs of words that are categorically related (dog cat), thematically related (dog leash) or not related (dog bottle), we can help uncover how the brain develops as children acquire more complex words and concepts.

Bilingualism: In addition to investigating the adult corresponding responses to each of our developmental projects, we are studying the neurological influence of bilingualism in adults and children. More and more evidence indicates that exposing the brain to multiple languages from a young age may affect other areas of cognition. Our lab is conducting a series of studies across the life span to uncover how learning multiple languages at different ages influences brain processing.

ADHD

As many as 2-5% of children suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder, making it one of the most prevalent disorders in children. Doctors are recommending medications at increasingly younger ages. Working in conjunction with the Center for BrainHealth and UT Southwestern, we are looking for new ways to identify brain differences between children with and without the disorder. The long-term goal is to find a better way to diagnosis, treat, and track changes as children with the disorder develop to lower the need for medication in children.

Current Studies:

One of the clearest underlying deficits in children with ADHD is the in inhibition – or the ability to stop a response, thought, or behavior. We have multiple ongoing studies that investigate inhibition abilities in real world situations for children with and without the disorder as well as adults. Currently we are looking at how various medications and interventions influence the processing of relevant and irrelevant information during memory and attention tasks.

Our Past Studies:

Nouns vs Verbs:

Verbs are much harder to learn than nouns and appear later in most children’s vocabularies. This is especially true for children with developmental problems, such as autism. However most of the field of language development has focused on noun acquisition to the neglect of verbs. In our lab we are studying how nouns and verbs are processed differently by children throughout the lifespan in hopes of uncover where some of this difficulty in acquisition may lie. Two different studies are investigating these problems.

Verb meanings: It may be that verbs are harder to learn because verb concepts are harder to visualize. For example, it is easier to form a mental image of a blanket that is relatively to similar to your blanket, grandma’s blanket and nearly any blanket you are likely to see. For even a very concrete verb like jumping though any mental image could be really different for mom jumping compared to a frog, or even the physical experience of jumping one’s self. This difference in imageability may be one of the problems children encounter when learning a new verb. We are studying the neurological processing of nouns and verbs that are easy and hard to form images of to further understand this difference.

Grammatical processing: Verbs contain much of the grammatical information in a sentence, such as agreement (She walk vs. she walks) and tense (she walked vs. she walks). Research with adults consistently shows two distinct ERP components that differ when processing grammatically correct or incorrect sentences. Our interests are in how children detect errors in novel verbs and how this changes over time.

P600:

This study investigates children’s ability to necessary grammatical extension to novel verb types. Research with adults consistently shows two distinct ERP components that differ when processing grammatically correct or incorrect sentences (the LAN (or ELAN) and the p600 (see Hahne & Friederici, 1999 or Friederici, 2002 for review).

Further there is evidence that adults show these same differences when listening to jabberwalky sentences, which are thought to have grammatical properties but little or no semantic information. For example, The snipe grambled herpishly vs. Snipe the grambled herpishly (Hahne & Jescheniak, 2001).

It has been argued that differences in the adult brainwaves in relation to these errors indicate that grammatical processing can be independent of semantic processing. Our interests are only how children detect errors in novel verbs and how this changes over time. As a result we are testing the development of processing these grammatical errors with known verbs, verbs whose meanings are just learned in a different verb form (teaching the meaning of to lorp and testing on errors in lorping), and verbs whose meanings are unknown (testing on errors in lorping though that word has never been learned).

Our goal is to uncover when neurological processes are in place for children to detect grammatical violations to novel verbs and how that changes over time. Primarily we are tracking the development of the ELAN compared to the p600 to help uncover the levels of grammatical processing across development.

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Participant Recruitment:

We are currently recruiting children and adolescents (ages 3 – 17) for our ADHD and language development studies. If you are interested in participating in our studies, or the compensation for your or your child's participation, please contact us at (214) 905-3000 or utd.dev.neuro.lab@gmail.com. Thank you!

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Publications:

Brier, M., Maguire, M.J., Tillman, G.D., Hart, J., & Kraut, M. (in press) Event-related potentials in semantic memory retrieval. Journal of the International Neuroscience Society.

Maguire, M. J., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R.M., & Brandone, A. (2008). Focusing on the relation: Fewer exemplars facilitate children’s initial verb learning and extension. Developmental Science, 11(4), 628-634.

Maguire, M.J. & Dove, G.O. (2008). Speaking of events: What event language can tell us about event representations and their development. In T.F. Shipley and J. Zacks (Eds.), Understanding events: From perception to action (pp. 193-220). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Shipley, T.F. & Maguire, M.J. (2008). Geometric information for event segmentation. In T.F. Shipley and J. Zacks (Eds.), Understanding events: From perception to action (pp. 415-435). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Hart, J., Anand, R., Zoccoli, S., Maguire, M., Gamino, J, Anand, R. King, R. & Kraut, M. A. (2007). Neural substrates of semantic memory. Journal of International Neuropsychology Society, 13, 865-880.

Maguire, M. J. (2007). Getting more action: Fewer exemplars facilitate verb extensions. In B. Skarabela, S. Fish, & A. H.J. Do (Eds.), Proceedings of the Boston University Annual Conference on Language Development (pp. 418-429). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Brand one, A., Golinkoff, R. M., Pulverman, R., Maguire, M. J., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Pruden, S. M. (2007). Speaking for the wordless: Methods for studying cognitive linguistic constructs in infants. In M. Gonzalez-Marquez, I. Mittelberg, S. Coulson, & M. Spivery (Eds.), Methods in cognitive linguistics (pp. 345-366). John Benjamins: Amsterdam.

Maguire, M.J., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R.M (2006). A unified theory of verb learning: Putting verbs in context. In K. Hirsh-Pasek and R. M. Golinkoff (Eds.), Action meets word: How children learn verbs (pp.364-391). New York: Oxford University Press.

Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R. M., Hennon, E. A., Maguire, M. J., & Sootsman, J. (2006). O modelo “emergentista” de colalizão da aprendizagem de palavras: uma nova maneira de se pensar na psicologia do desenvolvimento (The emergentist coalition model of word learning: A new mode of thinking in developmental psychology). In Corrêa, L. M. S. (Ed.). Aquisição da Linguagem e Problemas do Desenvolvimento Lingüístico (Language development and problems in the development of language). Rio de Janeiro: Editora da PUC-Rio.

Key, A., Dove, G., & Maguire, M.J. (2005). Linking brainwaves to the brain: An ERP component primer. Developmental Neuropsychology. 27, 183-216.

Molfese, D. L. Maguire, M. J., Molfese, V. J., Pratt, N., Ratajczak, E. D., Fentress, L. F., & Molfese, P. J. (2005). Brain and Language: Phonological, Lexical, Syntactic and Semantic Disorders in Children. In K. Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2 nd Edition, Kidlington Oxford, England: Elsevier Ltd.

Molfese, D. L., Fonaryova-Key, A., Maguire, M.J., Dove, G., & Molfese, V. J. (2005). Event-related evoked potentials (ERPs) in speech perception. In D. Pisoni (Ed.), Handbook of speech perception (pp.99-121). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Pruden, S., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Maguire, M. J., & Meyer, M., (2005). Foundations of verb learning: Infants form categories of path and manner in motion events. Proceedings of the Boston University Annual Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R.M., Hennon, E. A., & Maguire, M. J. (2004). Hybrid theories at the frontier of developmental psychology: The emergentist coalition model of word learning as a case in point. In G. Hall & S. Waxman (Eds.), Weaving a lexicon (pp. 173-204). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Golinkoff, R.M., Chung, H. L., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Liu, J., Bertenthal, B. I., Brand, R., Maguire, M. J., & Hennon, E. A. (2002). Young children can extend motion verb labels to point-light displays. Developmental Psychology, 38, 604-615.

Maguire, M.J., Hennon, E.A., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R.M., Slutzky, C.B., & Sootsman, J. (2002). Mapping words to actions and events: How do 18-month-olds learn a verb? In B. Skarabela, S. Fish, & A. H.J. Do (Eds.), Proceedings of the Boston University Annual Conference on Language Development (pp. 371-382). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Just, M.A., Carpenter, P.A., Maguire, M., Diwadkar, V.A., & McMains, S. (2001). Mental rotation of objects retrieved from memory: An fMRI study of spatial processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,130, 493-504.

Hirsh-Pasek, K., Hennon, E. A., Golinkoff, R. M., Pence, K., Pulverman, R., Sootsman, J., Pruden, S., & Maguire, M. J. (2001). Social attention need not equal social intention: From attention to intention in early word learning. Brain and Behavioral Sciences, 24, 1108-1109.

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Last Updated: 09.02.2008