Skip to main content

Cynthia L Fisher

Profile picture for Cynthia L Fisher

Contact Information

University of Illinois
Dept. of Psychology, MC-716
619 Psychology Building
603 E. Daniel St.
Champaign, IL 61820
USA
Professor of Psychology

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., University of Pennsylvania

Additional Campus Affiliations

Professor, Psychology

Recent Publications

Yu, Y., Havron, N., & Fisher, C. (Accepted/In press). Syntactic Adaptation and Word Learning in 3- to 4-Year-Olds. Language Learning. 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.

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).

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

Yoon, S. O., Jin, K. S., Brown-Schmidt, S., & Fisher, C. L. (2021). What’s New to You? Preschoolers’ Partner-Specific Online Processing of Disfluency. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, Article 612601. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.612601

View all publications on Illinois Experts