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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. Revised April 2006
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