By training, I’m a developmental psychologist and linguist. The classes I teach and the research I conduct focus on the cognitive mechanisms – like attention, executive function, and memory – that allow young children to make sense of language and how children use their own questions as a tool for learning. I have two broad lines of research, and each one leverages Grinnell’s unique research preschool laboratory, which allows undergraduates in psychology courses and my lab to better understand how young humans develop.
In one line of work, I’m interested in understanding how variation influences word learning in 2- to 5-year-olds. When we hear a word, it is typically referring to a specific referent, spoken by just one person, and used in a single context. The next time we encounter the same word, any or all of those features – the referent, the speaker, and the context – may change. Across multiple exposures, this variability can add up. Despite that, young children must make sense of a word’s meaning and understand the bounds of its reference. In some cases, variation helps word learning, but in other instances it can disrupt learning. My research explores what factors predict the relative benefit or cost of variability during word learning.
In my other line of work, I explore how children actively engage with the world to facilitate their own learning. More specifically, I focus on question asking in the preschool period. While anyone who has spent time with 2- to 5-year-olds knows they are prolific question askers, research on the role of this tool in learning is surprisingly limited. This line of work aims to identify the conditions under which question asking is most likely to influence learning. Given recent technological advances and shifts in children’s daily lives, I am especially excited to explore how young children ask questions of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of voice assistants.
Outside of teaching and research, I’m often walking my dog around Grinnell, and I’m an aspiring fiction writer. I’m always looking for reasons to talk about queer fiction!
Nicholas Tippenhauer, PhD 