Affiliated with the Developmental Division

How do children learn their native language? Learning a language requires learning to integrate multiple sources of information to generate a plausible interpretation of others' words and sentences. My research has focused on young children's abilities to exploit two sources of information. First, to determine what a word means, children have to figure out which object is under discussion, perhaps by considering what the speaker sees, knows, and believes. My research examines when infants become able to reason about these psychological processes and to integrate these types of information when interpreting linguistic information. Second, children also have to figure out the systematic ways in which people combine words into sentences to convey meaning. I have explored how children extract meaning from sentences, focusing on their interpretation of ambiguous pronouns in connected sentences. For example, when hearing a short story, "Sylvia went with Cindy to the store. She bought a coat," adults tend to assume that it is Sylvia who bought the coat, because Sylvia is the subject of the first sentence. My research has asked whether young children also resolve ambiguous pronouns using the structure of previous sentences.

Representative Publications:

• Fisher, C., & Song, H. (in press). Who's the subject? Sentence structures as analogs of verb meaning. To appear in K. Hirsh-Pasek & R. Golinkoff (Eds.), Action meets word: How children learn verbs. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
• Fisher, C., Klingler, S., & Song, H. (in press). What does syntax say about space? 2-year-olds use sentencestructure to learn new prepositions. Cognition
• Song, H., & Fisher, C. (2005). Who's "she"? Discourse prominence influences preschoolers' comprehension of pronouns. Journal of Memory and Language, 52, 29-57.
• Song, H., Baillargeon, R., & Fisher, C. (2005). Can infants attribute to an agent a disposition to perform a particular action? Cognition, 98, B45-B55.
• Song, H., & Fisher, C. (2002). Young children's sensitivity to discourse cues in on-line pronoun comprehension. In B. Skarabela, S. Fish, & A. H. Do (Eds.), BUCLD 26: Proceedings of the 26th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 653-664). Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.