Title(s): Professor

Education: Ed.D., Rutgers University

Affiliations: Chairperson, Department of Educational Psychology; Director of the Infant/Early Childhood Specialist Interdisciplinary Studies program (ISIS).

Research interests:

Language Acquisition and Development; Early Childhood Development and Education

Recent publications:

McCune, L. (2008) How children learn to learn words: Dynamic systems in development and action. New York: Oxford University Press

  Book Abstract

              How Children Learn to Learn Language addresses a topic rarely approached : Children’s discovery of the possibility of language. Studies of language acquisition tend to assume that children will learn language without questioning what sets this process in motion. McCune assumes that for children to refer to objects and events in the world they must learn to refer, and in that process they « learn to learn language ». Learning to produce the sounds of language is given equal billing here with the need to develop meanings. Learning language is presented as a co-construction of meanings and the sound sequences that represent them. Before such co-construction can be effective McCune demonstrates that children discover their capacity for reference through experiencing the accompaniment of their internal states of focused attention with an autonomic physiologically-based vocalization that has previously been neglected in the language acquisition literature, the autonomic grunt resulting from physical or mental effort. This same vocalization, intensified and directed to a partner, becomes their first protoword as they attempt to convey an internal state to a conversational partner.
             McCune traces the course of social, cognitive, and vocal pre-language development, demonstrating a dynamic system of variables that come together in the transition to referential language. The relationship with one or more loving caregivers provides the foundation for cognitive and language development. Language is conceived as a system of symbolic communication that can emerge only with the child’s recognition of separateness from the initial sense of unity with the caregiver. Developing in tandem, yet each at its own rate, cognition, mental representation, and phonetic skill prompt the transition to referential language.

Herr-Israel, E. & McCune, L. (2006) Dynamic event words, motion events and the transition to verb meanings. In N. Gagarina & I Gulzow (eds.) The acquisition of verbs and their grammar: The effect of languages; Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics Vol.33, 2006, pp124-149.

McCune, L. (2002). Motion, perception, and action: Do mirror neurons potentiate linguistic encoding? Proceedings of the ELA 2001: Early lexical acquisition: Normal and pathological development Lyon, France.

McCune, L. (2002). Mirror neurons’ registration of biological motion: A resource for cognitive/linguistic relational meaning? In Mirror neurons and the evolution of language and brain. Maxim I. Staminov and Vittorio Gallese (Eds.). Amsterdam, NE: John Benjamins.

McCune, L. and Agayoff, J. (2002). Pretending as representation: A developmental and comparative view. In R. Mitchell (Ed.) Pretending in animals and children. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

McCune, L. and Zanes, M. (2001) Learning, attention and play. In S. Golbeck, (Ed.) Psychological Perspectives on Early Childhood Education: Reframing Dilemmas in research and Practice. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

McCune, L., Vihman, M. M., Roug-Hellichius, L., Bordeneave, D., & Gogate, L. (1996). Grunt communication in human infants (homo sapiens). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 110, 27-37.

McCune, L. (1995). A normative study of representational play at the transition to language. Developmental Psychology, 31, 198-206.

last updated 10/11/07