Sandra Waxman is a Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University, a position she has held since 1992. Previously she was an Assistant (1986-89) and Associate (1989-92) Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. At Northwestern, she was a cofounder in 2000 of its Program on Culture, Language, and Cognition.She completed her undergraduate studies and doctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania (B.S., 1976; Ph.D., 1985) and her master's degree studies at Johns Hopkins University (1981).
Her principal area of interest is cognitive psychology, specifically the development of language and concepts in infants and children, and she has published numerous articles on her researches. Among them are (with D. B. Markow), “Words as invitations to form categories: Evidence from 12- to 13-month-old infants,” Cognitive Psychology, 29, No. 3 (1995); (with J. Lidz), “Early word learning,” in Handbook of Child Psychology, vol. 2, ed. D. Kuhn and R. Siegler, 6th ed. (Wiley, 2006); “Folkbiological reasoning from a cross-cultural developmental perspective: Early essentialist notions are shaped by cultural beliefs,” Developmental Psychology, 43, No. 2 (2007); (with F. K. Anggoro and D. L. Medin), “Naming Practices and the Acquisition of Key Biological Concepts: Evience from English and Indonesian,” Psychological Science, 19, No. 4 (2008); and (with H. M. Norbury and H. Song), “Tight and loose are not created equal: An asymmetry underlying the representation of fit in English and Korean speakers,” Cognition, 109 (2008). In addition to her research, teaching, and writing, she is also an associate editor of Cognitive Psychology.
Ms. Waxman has been a Research Fellow of the Spencer Foundation and the National Academy of Education; a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Cognitive Science in Lyon, France; and a CNRS Visiting Professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.
In 2007, Ms. Waxman garnered the American Psychological Society’s James McKeen Cattell Award, and the following year the University of Illinois honored her with its Ann L. Brown Award for Excellence in Developmental Research. She was elected a Fellow of the American Psychological Association in 1990, and in 2005 she was elected a Fellow of the American Psychological Society.
During her Guggenheim Fellowship term, Sandra Waxman continued her research on how notions of the natural world unfold across development, across cultures, and across languages.
Research Interests
Cognitive development; language and conceptual development in infancy and early childhood; acquisition of concepts, word-meaning, and reasoning; early inductive reasoning.
Early Linguistic and Conceptual Development(Project on Child Development) - This servies of studies addresses issues of early conceptual development, language development and the relation between them.
Biological Thought: A Cross Cultural View(Cross Cultural Biological Thought Research)- We are focusing on how our notions of the natural world unfold - across development, across cultures, and across languages, asking fundamental questions which include, “What is the place of humans within the natural world?”, “What does it mean to be ‘alive’?”, and “How do children across cultures develop these concepts?”
Science Inside and Outside the Classroom: In collaboration with researchers on the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin and the American Indian Center in Chicago, we are exploring children's reasoning about biology and science across cultures (Native American/Majority) and across rural/urban populations. We hope to develop this line of research into workable interventions that improve students' understanding of science and preserve the biological knowledge that Native American students bring with them into the classroom.
Selected Publications
Leddon, E.M., Waxman, S.R., Medin, (in press).What does it mean to 'live' and 'die'? A cross-linguistic analysis of parent-child conversations in English and Indonesian. British Journal of Developmental Psychology.
Fennell, C. & Waxman, S.R. (2010).What paradox? Referential cues allow for infant use of phonetic detail in word learning. Child Development. 81(5), 1376–1383.
Medin, D., Waxman, S., Woodring, J., & Washinawatok, K. (2010). Human-centeredness is not a universal feature of young children’s reasoning: Culture and experience matter when reasoning about biological entities. Cognitive Development, 25(3), 197-207.
Arunachalam, S. & Waxman, S.R (2010).Meaning from syntax: Evidence from 2-year-olds. Cognition.114(3), 442-446.
Waxman, S. (2010).Names will never hurt me? Naming and the development of racial and gender categories in preschool-aged children. European Journal of Social Psychology. 40(4), 593-610.
Anggoro, F., Medin, D. & Waxman, S. (2010). Language and Experience Influence Children’s Biological Induction. Journal of Cognition and Culture. 10, 171-187.
Ferry, A., Hespos, S., & Waxman, S. (2010).Categorization in 3- and 4-Month-Old Infants: An Advantage of Words Over Tones. Child Development.81(2), 472-479.
Herrmann, P., Waxman, S.R., & Medin, D.L. (2010). Anthropocentrism is not the first step in children's reasoning about the natural world. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 107 (22) 9979-9984.
Waxman, S.R., Lidz, J., Braun, I. E., Lavin, T.(2009) Twenty-four-month-old infants’ interpretations of novel verbs and nouns in dynamic scenes. Cognitive Psychology.
Waxman, S.R., Gelman, S.A. (2009).Early word-learning entails reference, not merely associations. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. online 10.1016/j.tics.2009.03.006
Booth, A.E. & Waxman, S.R. (2009). A Horse of a Different Color: Specifying with Precision Infants' Mappings of Novel Nouns and Adjectives. Child Development. 80(1), 15-22.
