Ph.D., Stanford University
A.B., Mount Holyoke College

Maureen Callanan's research focuses on cognitive and language development in toddler and preschool children, exploring how children come to understand the world through everyday conversations with their parents.

One particular focus is on how children learn word meanings and understand multiple names for the same objects. Callanan's research examines parents' strategies for labeling objects and children's use of these strategies in interpreting new words. The studies have demonstrated important links between children's expectations and parents' labeling strategies.

Callanan has also focused on how children's theories about the world (e.g., how heat makes things melt, what makes people sad) develop within parent-child conversations. Children's "why" questions and parents' explanations are studied through parent's diary reports of children's questions and through videotapes of parent-child activities like reading books, baking muffins and visiting children's museums. The research explores how children and parents construct shared understandings of concepts and of causal theories about particular domains, including scientific and interpersonal domains.

Cognitive and language development in the social context of family activities, development of word meanings and concepts, the construction of causal explanations in parent-child conversations.

Callanan, M., & Sabbagh, M. (2004). Multiple labels for objects in conversations with young children: Parents' language and children's developing expectations about word meanings. Developmental Psychology, 40, 746-763.

Jipson, J., & Callanan, M. (2003). Mother-child conversation and children's understanding of biological and non-biological changes in size. Child Development, 74, 629-644.

Callanan, M., Jipson, J., & Soennichsen, M. (2002). Maps, globes and videos: Parent-child conversations about representational objects. In S. Paris (Ed.) Perspectives on Object-Centered Learning in Museums (pp. 261-283). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Tenenbaum, H., Callanan, M., Alba-Speyer, C., & Sandoval, L. (2002). The role of educational background, activity, and past experiences in Mexican-descent families' science conversations. Hispanic Journal of the Behavioral Sciences, 24, 225-248.

Crowley, K., Callanan, M.A., Tenenbaum, H.R., & Allen, E. (2001). Parents explain more often to boys than to girls during shared scientific thinking. Psychological Science, 12, 258-261.