Dr Danielle Matthews
Address
The University of Sheffield
Sheffield S10 2TP, UK
Tel: (+44) 0114 22 26548
Fax: (+44) 0114 27 66515
Email danielle.matthews@sheffield.ac.uk
Room: LG-10
Qualifications
BA (Leeds), MSc (Edinburgh), PhD (Manchester)
Teaching and administrative duties
Teaching: PSY249 Developmental Psychology; PSY259 Psychological Concepts and Skills; PSY6120 Research Methods in Psychology; PSY6230 Reviewing Psychological Research; DClinPsy Critical Appraisal- Literature Review. Supervision of undergraduate and postgraduate research on the topic of Language Development.
Admin: Co-director of the MSc in Psychological Research. Careers and PDP liaison for Psychology.
Research Interests
Developmental Psychology & Language Development. Current focus on pragmatics and language development in infancy. Also interested in grammar and bilingualism.
Pragmatic Development
Recent psychological studies demonstrate that infants have a remarkable ability to engage with others communicatively. Yet clearly young children, indeed even adults, sometimes have real difficulty with understanding other people and making themselves understood. I´m interested in investigating:
1) the nature of early communicative abilities and difficulties
2) the experiences that enable children to become more effective language users
3) the way in which linguistic exchanges can foster insights into both communication and other domains, for example, social cognition
The Development of Reference
Around their first birthdays most infants begin to communicate with other people about objects and events in their environment. I am interested in conducting studies that explain how we achieve reference in increasingly complex situations. I attempt to answer questions like the following:
What effect does experience have on the emergence of pointing behaviour between 9 and 12 months?
How does parent-infant interaction foster early word learning?
What is the effect of SES on language development in infancy and early childhood?
How do children learn to produce an appropriate referring expression given what their addressee knows or can perceive?
Do children create expectations about how people will refer to things in the future given their past use of language?
How do children learn the meanings of plurifunctional words like ´the´ and `a´ (that are so hard for non native speakers of English to master)?
How can parents, peers and teachers scaffold a child´s communicative environment and thereby facilitate learning?
How does parental scaffolding of language development vary cross-culturally?
The Learnability of Grammar
In addition to learning about the art of communication, children also need to acquire the words and structures that make up their native language(s). Part of my PhD and some current work has been designed to contribute to the learnability debate in grammatical development. The aim here is to explain how the cognitive biases children bring to language acquisition interact with properties of the ambient language(s) to shape development.
In collaboration with Colin Bannard I have recently investigated children´s ability to produce phrases as a function of the frequency of co-occurrence of their component words. We extracted frequently occurring and matched control phrases from densely sampled corpora of child directed speech and used these as stimuli in a series of repetition studies. In a first study, we established that two- and three-year-olds are better at repeating more frequent phrases. In a second study we found that children´s willingness to produce unfamiliar phrases reflects their experience with similar lexical patterns.
Publications
Matthews, D., Lieven, E., Tomasello, M. (in press) Two- and four-year-olds learn to adapt referring expressions to context: Effects of distracters and feedback on referential communication. TopiCS.
Matthews, D., Lieven, E., Tomasello, M. (2010) What’s in a manner of speaking? Children’s sensitivity to partner-specific referential precedents. Developmental Psychology. 46(4), 749-760.
Matthews, D., Bannard, C. (2010) Children's production of unfamiliar word sequences is predicted by positional variability and latent classes in a large sample of child directed speech. Cognitive Science. 34(3), 465–488.
Pyykkönen, P., Matthews, D., Järvikivi, J. (2010) Verb semantics affects children’s pronoun comprehension: Evidence form eye-movements. Language and Cognitive Processes. 25(1), 115-129.
Matthews, D., Lieven, E., Theakston A., Tomasello, M. (2009) Pronoun co-referencing errors: challenges for generativist and usage-based accounts. Cognitive Linguistics. 20(3), 599-626.
Bannard, C., Matthews, D. (2008) Stored Word Sequences in Language Learning: The effect of familiarity on
children’s repetition of four-word combinations. Psychological Science, 19, 241-8.
Matthews, D., Lieven, E., Tomasello, M. (2007) How toddlers and preschoolers learn to uniquely identify referents for others: A training study. Child Development. 78(6), 1744-1759.
Matthews, D., Lieven, E., Theakston A., Tomasello, M. (2007) French children’s use and correction of weird word orders: A constructivist account. Journal of Child Language. 34, 381-409.
Matthews, D., Theakston A. (2006) Errors of omission in English-speaking children’s production of plurals and
the past tense: The effects of frequency, phonology and competition. Cognitive Science, 30 (1027-52)
Matthews, D., Lieven, E., Theakston A., Tomasello, M. (2006) The effect of perceptual availability and prior discourse on young children’s use of referring expressions. Applied Psycholinguistics 27, 403-422.
Matthews, D., Lieven, E., Theakston A., Tomasello, M. (2005) The role of frequency in the acquisition of English word order. Cognitive Development, 20 (1) 121-136.