Maureen Callanan is Professor and chair of the psychology department at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on cognitive and language development in young children, exploring how children come to understand the world through everyday conversations with their parents. One particular focus is on how children's intuitive theories about the world (e.g., how heat makes things melt, what makes people sad) develop within parent-child conversations. Children's "why" questions and parents' explanations are studied through parent's diary reports of children's questions and through videotapes of parent-child activities such as reading books, baking muffins and visiting children's museums. The research explores how children and parents construct shared understandings of concepts and of causal theories about particular domains, with special attention to scientific domains. Callanan has also focused on how children learn word meanings and understand multiple names for the same objects. Her studies examining how parents and children name objects in everyday conversations have demonstrated important links between parents' language and children's interpretations of new words.