Clifford H. Fisher

About

The Language Acquisition Lab at the University of Illinois, Department of Psychology, investigates how infants and children learn to speak and understand their native language. Established in 1989, the lab's research focuses on understanding how sounds are combined to form words, how words are combined to create sentences, and how sentences convey meaning. The lab seeks to discover what young children at various ages know about the words and rules of their native language, as well as the learning mechanisms that enable this development. Their studies involve young children, adults, and computational modeling to provide a comprehensive understanding of language acquisition.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Natural Language Processing
• Linguistics
• Machine Learning
• Psychology
• Internal medicine
• Social psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Developmental psychology

Selected publications

• The Developmental Origins of Syntactic Bootstrapping

  Topics in Cognitive Science · 2019-08-16 · 98 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Children use syntax to learn verbs, in a process known as syntactic bootstrapping. The structure-mapping account proposes that syntactic bootstrapping begins with a universal bias to map each noun phrase in a sentence onto a participant role in a structured conceptual representation of an event. Equipped with this bias, children interpret the number of noun phrases accompanying a new verb as evidence about the semantic predicate-argument structure of the sentence, and therefore about the meaning…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Where are the cookies? Two- and three-year-olds use number-marked verbs to anticipate upcoming nouns

  Cognition · 2015-11-09 · 96 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• BabyBERTa: Learning More Grammar With Small-Scale Child-Directed Language

  2021 · 73 citations

  Transformer-based language models have taken the NLP world by storm. However, their potential for addressing important questions in language acquisition research has been largely ignored. In this work, we examined the grammatical knowledge of RoBERTa Using the behavioral probing paradigm, we found that a smaller version of RoBERTa-base that never predicts unmasked tokens, which we term BabyBERTa, acquires grammatical knowledge comparable to that of pre-trained RoBERTa-base -and does so with appr…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Toddlers Default to Canonical Surface-to-Meaning Mapping When Learning Verbs

  Child Development · 2013-10-11 · 45 citations

  articleOpen access

  Previous work has shown that toddlers readily encode each noun in the sentence as a distinct argument of the verb. However, languages allow multiple mappings between form and meaning that do not fit this canonical format. Two experiments examined French 28-month-olds' interpretation of right-dislocated sentences (nouni -verb, nouni) where the presence of clear, language-specific cues should block such a canonical mapping. Toddlers (N = 96) interpreted novel verbs embedded in these sentences as t…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Action anticipation based on an agent's epistemic state in toddlers and adults

  2021 · 31 citations

  Do toddlers and adults engage in spontaneous Theory of Mind (ToM)? Evidence from anticipatory looking (AL) studies suggests that they do. But a growing body of failed replication studies raised questions about the paradigm’s suitability. In this multi-lab collaboration, we test the robustness of spontaneous ToM measures. We examine whether 18- to 27-month-olds’ and adults’ anticipatory looks distinguish between two basic forms of an agent’s epistemic states: knowledge and ignorance. In toddlers…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R55HD034715

  NIH · $100k · 2000

• NIH Grant R01HD044458

  NIH · $1.4M · 2012

• Verb learning and the early development of sentence comprehension

  NIH · $2.8M · 2007–2021

Frequent coauthors

• Dan Roth

  10 shared

• Yael Gertner

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  8 shared

• Michael Connor

  7 shared

• Isabelle Dautriche

  Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive

  6 shared

• Perrine Brusini

  University of Liverpool

  6 shared

• Anne Christophe

  École des hautes études en sciences sociales

  6 shared

• Hyun-joo Song

  6 shared

• Barbara A. Church

  Georgia State University

  6 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Psychology

  University of Pennsylvania

Similar researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

• Monica Fabianih-70
• Florin Dolcosh-58
• Kara D Federmeierh-58