Dr. Linda B. Smith

Department Chair
Chancellor's Professor of Psychology

Contact Information

Office: PY 126
Office Phone: 812-855-6052
Lab: PY A104
Lab Phone:812-855-8256
E-mail:

Web site: The Cognitive Development Lab

Educational Background

1973
B.S., University of Wisconsin-Madison
1977
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

Areas of Study

Cognitive Science
Developmental Psychology

Research Topics

Perceptual and cognitive development in early childhood
Classification and categorization
Interactions between perception and language.

Research Summary:

Young children produce their first word when they are about a year old. Over the next several months, they add new words to their productive vocabulary slowly, one word at a time. In contrast, children one year older are rapid word learners, and particularly rapid learners of object names. They are so good at this task that they need to hear only a single object named to correctly generalize that name to other members of the category. Young children's facility in mapping nouns to categories is particularly remarkable because nouns name objects in many different kinds of categories --- categories of substances, people, animals, and artifacts. The ease with which children learn names for all these kinds suggests that they understand the different organizational principles of different categories. My research specifically seeks to understand how children become rapid noun learners and how come to understand the different organizations of different kinds of categories. To this end, we study the nature of the input (the kinds of categories children learn early and the language they hear; we study how children learn new words and we compare noun learning to the learning of adjectives and verbs; we study how children' s attention and perception of objects changes as a function of category learning and word learning; we study children learning different languages ---most particularly, English and Japanese; we study children who show atypical courses of early noun learning (language delay); and we attempt to model how word learning changes the process of learning itself through neural network simulations.

Representative Publications

in press - Samuelson, L. & Smith, L.B. They call it like they see it: A shape bias in children spontaneous productions. Developmental Science.

in press - Gerhskoff-Stowe, L. & Smith, L.B. Shape and the first hundred nouns. Child Development.

in press - Smith, L.B. & Gasser, M. The development of embodied cogntion: Six lessons from babies. Artificial Life.

in press - Yoshida, H. & Smith, L.B. Linguistic cues enhance the learning of perceptual cues. Psychological Science.

2004 - Sandhofer, C. & Smith, L.B. Perceptual complexity and form class cues in novel word extension tasks: how 4 year old children interpret novel adjectives and count nouns. Developmental Science, 7, 378-388.

2003 - Colunga, E, Smith, L.B. The emergence of abstract ideas: Evidence from networks and babies. Philosophical Transactions by the Royal Society B. Theme Issue: 'The abstraction paths: from experience to concept'. L. Saitta (Ed) 358(1435) pp. 1205-1214

2003 - Smith, L.B. Different is good: connectionist and dynamic systems theory are complementary emergentist approaches to development. Developmental Science, 6, 434-439.

2003 - Smith, L.B. & Thelen, E. Development as a dynamic system. Trends in Cognitive Science, 7, 343-348.

2003 - Smith, L.B., Jones, S., Yoshida, H. & Colunga, E. Whose damn account? Attentional learning can explain Booth and Waxman. Cognition, 87, 209-213.

2003 - Smith, L. B. Learning to Recognize Objects. Psychological Science, 14 (3)244- 251.

2003 - Yoshida, H. & Smith, L.B. Known and novel noun extensions: Attention at two levels of abstraction. Child Development, 74 (2), 565-577.

2003 - Yoshida, H. & Smith, L.B. Shifting ontological boundaries: How Japanese- and English-speaking children generalize names for animals and artifacts. Target article in Developmental Science, 6, 1-17.

2003 - Yoshida, H. & Smith, L.B. Correlations, concepts and cross-linguistic differences. Developmental Science, 6, 30-34.