Contact Information
Research Areas
Student Research Opportunities
Research Description
Children rapidly acquire the grammar and vocabulary of their native languages. My research explores how they manage this. For example, what information do children use to figure out the meanings of verbs? In a series of studies in which novel verbs are taught to preschoolers in different grammatical contexts, children interpret verbs in different sentence structures as describing different aspects of the same events. Other work in my lab explores special properties of speech addressed to young children and infants, and young children's representation of speech they hear. These lines of research suggest that young children can use isomorphisms between levels of linguistic structures to gain access to successively deeper analyses of language, from sound to syntax to meaning.
Education
Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania
Additional Campus Affiliations
Associate Head, Psychology
Professor, Psychology
Professor, Linguistics
Recent Publications
Yu, Y., Havron, N., & Fisher, C. (2025). Syntactic Adaptation and Word Learning in 3- to 4-Year-Olds. Language Learning, 75(1), 117-145. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12661
Hwang, S., Dell, G. S., & Fisher, C. L. (2022). Is the learning of artificial phonotactic rules interfered with by the concurrent experience of English?. 2207-2213. Paper presented at 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Cognitive Diversity, CogSci 2022, Toronto, Canada.
Weihs, L., Yuile, A. R., Baillargeon, R., Fisher, C. L., Marcus, G., Mottaghi, R., & Kembhavi, A. (2022). Benchmarking Progress to Infant-Level Physical Reasoning in AI. Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2022-October.
Huebner, P. A., Sulem, E., Fisher, C., & Roth, D. (2021). BabyBERTa: Learning More Grammar With Small-Scale Child-Directed Language. In A. Bisazza, & O. Abend (Eds.), CoNLL 2021 - 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, Proceedings (pp. 624-646). (CoNLL 2021 - 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, Proceedings). Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.conll-1.49
Lin, Y., Li, J., Gertner, Y., Ng, W., Fisher, C. L., & Baillargeon, R. (2021). How do the object-file and physical-reasoning systems interact? Evidence from priming effects with object arrays or novel labels. Cognitive Psychology, 125, Article 101368. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2020.101368