Language and Persistence in School-Aged Children: an international collaboration with the Toronto Early Cognition Lab at The University of Toronto

Abstract

From a very young age, infants are exposed to new and challenging situations, but in order to succeed, they often need to be persistent. Recent evidence suggests that the type of language to which babies and children are exposed (e.g., praise that values effort vs. praise for children's characteristics) is associated with their individual persistence in challenging situations. However, as far as we know, there are no studies that relate the language used by children themselves and the persistence they present. Therefore, the Scientific Initiation project associated with this BEPE proposal (FAPESP #2023/16409-7) aims to investigate a possible relationship between the type of language used by 7- to 8-year old children during the narration of a wordless book (which presents several challenging situations to the main character) and performance on a persistence task. The present application seeks support for a 2-month visit to Dr. Jessica Sommerville's laboratory, at the University of Toronto. Dr. Sommerville and her research group are renowned worldwide for their work on children's persistence. Her work is especially relevant to the candidate's research project. The proposed research internship will provide a unique opportunity for the candidate to learn more about different research methods and advanced data analyses, which are relevant to her ongoing research. More specifically, she will be trained in behavioral coding and analysis. Moreover, this proposal represents a valuable opportunity to start an international collaboration that may prove fruitful for students from Universidade Federal de São Carlos who might be interested in pursuing this line of investigation in the future.