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 can children use the words they know to learn more words?
How does online speech processing vary across different types of speech (e.g., native or non-native accents) and populations (e.g., for bilingual children or children who are late talkers)?
Publications
Journal Articles
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 44thAnnual 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 paradigms. Journal of Visualized Experiments.
LaTourrette, A. & Waxman, S.R. (2019). A little labeling goes a long way: Semi-supervised learning in infancy. Developmental 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.
Presentations & Talks
Invited Talks
LaTourrette, A. (2022). Staying in the moment: How sentence context does and does not help learn words. Talk presented to Language and Cognition Research Group at Cardiff University.
LaTourrette, A. (2020). A little labeling goes a long way. Talk presented to Integrated Language Science and Technology Seminar at University of Pennsylvania.
LaTourrette, A. (2019). Learning from language: Intersections of infant and machine learning. Talk presented to Information Sciences Institute at University of Southern California.
LaTourrette, A. (2019). A little labeling goes a long way: Semi-supervised learning in human infants. Talk presented to University of Chicago Developmental Area.
LaTourrette, A. (2018). Understanding the role of language in infant categorization. Talk presented to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Developmental Area.
Conference Talks
LaTourrette, A., Waxman, S., Weisleder, A. (2021). From word recognition to word learning: Comparing online speech processing in typically developing and late-talking 2-year-olds. Talk to be presented at the 46th Boston University Conference on Language Development.
LaTourrette, A., Blanco, C., & Waxman, S. (2021). Putting the pieces together: Two-year-olds hearing an unfamiliar accent recognize known words and learn new words, but do not use known words to learn new words. Talk presented at 34th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Philadelphia, PA.
LaTourrette, A. & Waxman, S. (2018). The power of a name: Labeling changes infants' memory for individual objects. Talk presented at the 43rd Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, MA.
LaTourrette, A. & Waxman, S. (2018). Semi-supervised learning in human infants. Talk presented at 2018 edition of Science and Society Olivier Legrain Conference: Language Learning in Humans and Machines, Paris, France.
LaTourrette, A. & Waxman, S. (2017). A little labeling goes a long way: Semi-supervised learning in infancy. Talk presented at 42nd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, MA.
LaTourrette, A. & Waxman, S. (2016). The Blickish Blob: Object Categories Impair Adjective Learning. Talk presented at 41st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, MA.