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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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LaTourrette, A. & Waxman, S. (2022). Sparse labels, no problems: Infant categorization under
challenging conditions. Child Development.
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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.
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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.
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LaTourrette, A. & Waxman, S. (2020). Naming guides how 12-month-old infants encode and remember objects. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 202006608.
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LaTourrette, A. & Waxman, S.R. (2019). Defining the role of language in infants’ object categorization with eye-tracking paradigms. Journal of Visualized Experiments.
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LaTourrette, A. & Waxman, S.R. (2019). A little labeling goes a long way: Semi-supervised learning in infancy. Developmental Science. 22(1), e12736.
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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.
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LaTourrette, A., Myers, M., & Rips, L. (2018). Exclusivity in Causal Reasoning. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 665 – 670.
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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.