Affiliated with the Developmental Division

My research interests deal with how children acquire the words and rules of their native languages and how these processes can be modeled using computational tools. In one set of studies, we have explored what it is that toddlers represent about sentence structure and how they use it to learn verbs. In another set of studies, we implemented a computational tool for semantic role labeling that mimics the behavior of children. Another line of my work focuses on infants' physical reasoning. For example, we study whether language can facilitate infants' physical reasoning. In another set of studies we are exploring whether 7-month-olds infants can form algebraic rules from visual stimuli.

Representative Publications:

• Fisher, C., Gertner, Y., Scott, R. M., & Yuan, S. (2009). Syntactic bootstrapping. Invited paper to appear in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science
• Connor, M., Gertner, Y., Fisher, C., & Roth, D. (2009). Minimally Supervised Model of Early Language Acquisition. Proc. of the Annual Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)
• Connor, M., Gertner, Y., Fisher, C., & Roth, D. (2008). Baby SRL: Modeling Early Language Acquisition. Proc. of the Annual Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL).
• Gertner, Y., (2008). Book review of Kathy Hirsh-Pasek & Roberta M. Golinkoff (eds), Action Meets Word. How Children Learn Verbs. Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. 588. Journal of Child Language, 35, 727-733
• Gertner, Y., Fisher, C., & Eisengart, J. (2006). Learning words and rules: Abstract knowledge of word order in early sentence comprehension. Psychological Science, 17, 684-691.