Michelle M. Chouinard

The unifying objective of Professor Chouinard's research is to understand the role that adult-child conversation plays in children's cognitive development. She believes such conversation has unique strengths that allow children to gather information needed within and across all domains, as well as allow them to navigate the radical reorganizations they need to make within more specific domains of cognitive development.

Her research currently consists of three primary lines of investigation:

• Children's ability to ask questions when they need more information, a powerful mechanism at work in adult-child conversation
• The information parents give to children comparing animals to humans, and how this may play an important role in children's developing understanding of naïve biology
• Parents' and children's attempts to make themselves understood during the course of a conversation, and how this may contribute importantly to children's acquisition of language