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Research

My Interests

I study language, cognition, and their interaction across the lifespan: from infants as young as 6 months to preschool- and elementary-age children to adults. I am interested in questions like:

  • How does labeling objects influence the way infants categorize and remember them?

  • What information do children and adults use to learn, and remember, word meanings?

  • How do we learn to map different kinds of meanings to different kinds of words?

  • How does online speech processing vary across different types of speech?
    (e.g., familiar vs. unfamiliar accents, or clear vs. reduced speech)

  • How does language acquisition vary across learners? 
    (e.g., for bilingual children, or children who are late talkers)

Publications

Journal Articles

LaTourrette, A., Blanco, C., Atik, N.D., & Waxman, S.R. (2024). Navigating accent variability: 24-month-olds recognize known words spoken in an unfamiliar accent but require additional support to learn new words. Infant Behavior and Development.

Atik, N.D., LaTourrette, A., & Waxman, S.R. (2024). Preschoolers benefit from sentential context in familiar- and unfamiliar-accented speech. Developmental Science.

 

Chen, Y., LaTourrette, A. S., & Trueswell, J. (2024). The Role of Syntactic and Referential Evidence in Verb Learning across Exposures. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46.

LaTourrette, A., Chan, D., & Waxman, S.R. (2023) Forging a link between object naming and object representation: Evidence from 7-month and 12-month-old infants. Scientific Reports.

LaTourrette, A., Novack, M., & Waxman, S.R. (2023) Longer looks for language: Novel labels lengthen fixation duration for 2-year-old children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 236, 105754.

LaTourrette, A., Waxman, S.R., Wakschlag, L., Norton, E., & Weisleder, A. (2023) From recognizing known words to learning new ones: Comparing online speech processing in typically developing and late talking 2-year-olds. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research,  66(5), 1658-1677.

Yue, C.S., LaTourrette, A., Yang, C., & Trueswell, J. (2023). Memory as a computational constraint in cross-situational word learning. Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Chen, Y., LaTourrette, A., & Trueswell, J. (2023). Evidence for cross-situational syntactic bootstrapping:​​ Three-year olds generalize verb meaning across different syntactic frames. Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

LaTourrette, A. & Waxman, S. (2022). Sparse labels, no problems: Infant categorization under

challenging conditions. Child Development.

LaTourrette, A., Yang, C., & Trueswell, J. (2022). When close isn’t enough: Semantic similarity does not facilitate cross-situational word-learning. Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

LaTourrette, A. & Waxman, S. (2021). An Object Lesson: Objects, Non-Objects, and the Power of Conceptual Construal in Adjective Extension. Language Learning and Development, 1–14.

LaTourrette, A. & Waxman, S. (2020). Naming guides how 12-month-old infants encode and remember objects. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 202006608.

LaTourrette, A. & Waxman, S.R. (2019). Defining the role of language in infants’ object categorization with eye-tracking paradigmsJournal of Visualized Experiments.

LaTourrette, A. & Waxman, S.R. (2019). A little labeling goes a long way: Semi-supervised learning in infancyDevelopmental Science. 22(1), e12736.

Syrett, K., LaTourrette, A., Ferguson, B., & Waxman, S.R. (2019). Crying helps, but being sad doesn’t: Infants constrain nominal reference using known verbs, not known adjectives. Cognition, 193, 104033.

LaTourrette, A., Myers, M., & Rips, L. (2018). Exclusivity in Causal Reasoning. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 665 – 670.

LaTourrette, A., & Waxman, S.R. (2017). A conceptual account of children’s difficulties extending adjectives across basic-level kinds. Proceedings of the 41st Boston University Conference on Language Development.

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