Contact Information
Office hours: Tuesday 5-6 pm
Research Areas
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
Professor, Linguistics
Recent Publications
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, 101368. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2020.101368
Fisher, C., Jin, K. S., & Scott, R. M. (2020). The Developmental Origins of Syntactic Bootstrapping. Topics in Cognitive Science, 12(1), 48-77. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12447
Qi, Z., Love, J., Fisher, C., & Brown-Schmidt, S. (2020). Referential context and executive functioning influence children's resolution of syntactic ambiguity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 46(10), 1922-1947. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000886
Messenger, K., & Fisher, C. (2018). Mistakes weren't made: Three-year-olds’ comprehension of novel-verb passives provides evidence for early abstract syntax. Cognition, 178, 118-132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.05.002
Scott, R. M., Gertner, Y., & Fisher, C. (2018). Not all subjects are agents: Transitivity and meaning in early language comprehension. In Trends in Language Acquisition Research (Vol. 24, pp. 153-176). John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.24.07sco