About Us > Staff & Faculty > Patricia Ganea

Patricia Ganea

Tel: (416) 934-4502
Email: patricia.ganea@utoronto.ca
Language and Learning Lab: http:/patriciaganea.com/languagelearning/

Patricia Ganea is Assistant Professor at the Dr. Jackman Institute of Child Study and the Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development at OISE, University of Toronto. Dr. Ganea is a developmental psychologist who studies children’s learning, language development and symbolic development. At the Language and Learning Lab at ICS, Dr. Ganea and her research team investigate the processes involved in young children's learning about the world through symbolic means, such as language, pictures, videos and replica objects.

Representative publications

Canfield, C.F., & Ganea, P. A. (in press). "You Could Call It Magic": What Parents and Siblings Tell Preschoolers about Unobservable Entities. Journal of Cognition and Development.[PDF]

Ganea, P. A. & Harris, P. H. (2013). Early limits on the verbal updating of an object's location. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 114, 89-101[PDF]

Osina, M.A., Saylor, M.M., & Ganea,P. A. (2013). When familiar is not better: 12-month-olds respond to talk about absent objects. Developmental Psychology, 49, 138-145. [PDF]

Ganea, P. A. & Saylor, M. M. (2012).  Talking about the near and dear: Infants' comprehension of displaced speech. Developmental Psychology. [PDF]

Blake, P., Ganea,P. A., & Harris, P. L. (2012). Possession in not always the law: With age preschoolers increasingly use verbal information to identify who owns what. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 113, 259-272. [PDF]

Walker, C., Walker. L., & Ganea, P. A. (2012).The role of symbol-based experience in early learning and transfer from pictures: Evidence from Tanzania. Developmental Psychology. [PDF]

Ganea, P. A., Ma, L., & DeLoache, J. S. (2011). Young children’s learning and transfer of biological information from picture books to real animals. Child Development, 82, 1421-1433.

Ganea, P. A., Koenig, M. A., Gordon, M.K. (2011). Changing your mind about things unseen: Toddlers’ sensitivity to prior reliability. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. 109, 445-453.

Saylor, M. M., Ganea, P. A., & Vasquez, M. (2011). What’s mine is mine: Twelve-month-olds use possessive pronouns to identify referents. Developmental Science, 14, 859-864.

Tare, M., Chiong, C., Ganea, P. A., & DeLoache, J. S. (2010).  Less is More: How manipulative features affect children’s learning from picture books. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 31, 395-400.

Ganea, P. A. & Harris, P. L. (2010). Not doing what you are told: Early perseverative errors in updating mental representations via language. Child Development, 81, 457-463.

Ganea, P. A., Allen, M. A., Butler, L., Carey, S., & DeLoache, J. S. (2009). Toddlers’ referential understanding of pictures. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 104, 283-295.

Ma, L. & Ganea, P. A. (2009). Dealing with conflicting information: Young children’s reliance on what they see versus what they are told. Developmental Science, 2009, 1-10.

DeLoache, J. S. & Ganea, P. A. (2009). Symbol-based learning in infancy. In A. Needham & A. Woodward (Eds.), Learning and the infant mind. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Ganea, P. A., Pickard, M. & DeLoache, J. S. (2008). Transfer between picture books and the real world by very young children. Journal of Cognition and Development, 9, 46-66.

DeLoache, J. S., Ganea, P. A., & Jaswal, V. (2008). Early learning through language. In Colombo J, McCardle P, Freund L (Eds.), Measuring language in infancy. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Ganea, P. A., Shutts, K., Spelke, E., & DeLoache, J, S. (2007). Thinking of things unseen: Infants’ use of language to update object representations. Psychological Science, 18(8), 734-739.

Ganea, P. A., & Saylor, M. M. (2007). Infants’ use of shared linguistic information to clarify ambiguous requests. Child Development, 78(2),493-502.

Saylor, M. M., & Ganea, P. A. (2007). Infants interpret ambiguous requests for absent objects. Developmental Psychology, 43(3), 696-704.

DeLoache, J. S., & Ganea, P. A. (2007). The early growth of symbolic understanding and use:A tribute to Ann Brown. In Campione, J. C., Metz, K. E., & Palincsar, A. S.(Eds.), Children’s learning in the laboratory and in the classroom: Essays in honor of Ann Brown. New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum & Associates.

Ganea, P. A. (2005). Contextual factors affect absent reference comprehension in 14-montholds. Child Development, 76(5), 989-998.

Ganea, P. A., Lillard, A. S., Turkheimer, E. (2004). Preschooler’s understanding of the role of mental states and action in pretense. Journal of Cognition and Development, 5, 213-238.