Language Sciences member, Denitza Dramkin, is currently pursuing her PhD in Developmental Psychology working with Dr. Darko Odic in the Centre for Cognitive Development. Don't miss her upcoming Language Sciences Talk, 'Exploring the link between language and perception through number words and perceptual magnitudes'!
What are your current research interests?
My research interest broadly lies in the link between language and cognition. One way I'm exploring this is by examining how number words are mapped to our intuitive representations of number, space, and time. From birth, humans possess remarkably rich intuitions about these dimensions: with just a quick glance, we can tell which of two plates has more cookies on it or even which line has the fewest people in it, without counting or measuring. Through development, many humans also learn to attach language (e.g., number words) to these representations, allowing them to verbally quantify their intuitive perception of these dimensions (e.g., quickly being able estimate that there are approximately "ten” people in line without needing to count). I'm currently examining what mechanisms support our abilities to create these links between our intuitions about number, space, and time, and language (e.g., number words, quantifiers), and how these links are shaped across development.
What is a project you've worked on within the past few years that you're particularly proud of?
This is actually something that I'll be chatting about during my talk! In one line of studies, we set out to examine to what extent do children understand the "logic" of number words. By age five, most children can use number words to reason about any conceivable quantity in number; the only limit is the number words that they have access to. At the same time, it is not until much later in school that children are formally taught to use number words for other domains (e.g., length, area, time, etc.).
The first part of my dissertation looked at whether once children could attach number words to their representations of number, they could extend that logic to other domains of quantity. While some theoretical accounts posit that children could need specific practice/experience linking number words to each perceptual dimensions (e.g., practice learning to linking number words to their perception of length, their perception of area, and so on), we found that children could readily verbally estimate (i.e., use number words) for different quantity dimensions the very moment they grasped how to do this in the domain of number! Hence, before any formal experience or schooling, children as young as five could extrapolate the logic from one domain of quantity and apply it to others. This is especially exciting from the perspective of development, considering children have access to perceptual representations from birth and acquire number words slowly through development.
What inspires you to pursue your line of research?
In brief: the unanswered questions! Luckily -- and sometimes frustratingly -- there is no shortage of future avenues to pursue. What really drives me is figuring out what psychological mechanisms support our abilities to reason about the world in complex ways and getting at the theory is often motivated by a lot of experimental research.
If you had to choose a different career, what would you be interested in pursuing?
I’ve always been interested in new discoveries. When I was a child I was very interested in becoming a palaeontologist, but was worried that by the time I grew up there would be no more things left to discover, and so I made the pivot early on in life to focus on “discoveries” related to the contemporary human mind.
How do you like to spend your spare time?
I'm often doing something creative and crafty, like making art or cross-stitching, or getting out in nature, looking for a nice wooded area to explore!