Kathryn Davidson

About

Kathryn Davidson is a Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University whose research explores the human capacity to understand an infinite number of novel sentences through the study of semantics, pragmatics, and language development. Her work investigates how contextual information is incorporated into meaning and how humans learn to interpret language. She addresses fundamental questions about the types of symbolic and other representations that capture meaning in human language, the impact of language modality—including speech, sign, gesture, and writing—on meaning creation and sharing, and how meaning in language differs from meaning outside of language. Additionally, she explores the use of new tools for collecting and analyzing linguistic data to develop mathematically precise models of meaning, as well as the role of language input in language development, such as the benefits of sign language exposure for deaf children's overall language abilities. Davidson directs the Meaning & Modality Laboratory, where traditional linguistic theory is combined with psycholinguistic experimental methods to gather and analyze behavioral data from a variety of spoken and signed languages. Her lab also collaborates with computational linguists to compare human linguistic behavior with that of advanced artificial models, including Large Language Models, across similar tasks. Among her recent scholarly outputs are an Element on Semantics and Depiction and a book on Formal Semantics and…

Research topics

• Immunology
• Biochemistry
• Internal medicine
• Algorithm
• Cell biology
• Medicine
• Surgery
• Gastroenterology
• Biology

Selected publications

• Contemporary outcomes of the Foker process and evolution of treatment algorithms for long-gap esophageal atresia

  Journal of Pediatric Surgery · 2021 · 28 citations

  DOI

• The Emergence of Natural Language Quantification

  Cognitive Science · 2022-02-01 · 5 citations

  article

  Classical quantifiers (like "all," "some," and "none") express relationships between two sets, allowing us to make generalizations (like "no elephants fly"). Devices like these appear to be universal in human languages. Is the ubiquity of quantification due to a universal property of the human mind or is it attributable to more gradual convergence through cultural evolution? We investigated whether classical quantifiers are present in a new language emerging in isolation from other languages, Ni…

  PublisherDOI

• Default biases in the interpretation of English negation, conjunction, and disjunction

  Experiments in Linguistic Meaning · 2023-01-27 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Previous research has hypothesized default interpretive biases for three types of ambiguities with English logical words and, or, and not. First, disjunction (A or B) is hypothesized to be biased towards an exclusive interpretation in upward-entailing environments and an inclusive interpretation in downward-entailing environments (Levinson 2000, Chierchia 2004, Breheny et al. 2005). A negated disjunction (not A or B) is claimed to be biased towards a “neither-nor” interpretation (i.e. wide scope…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “More is up” for domain restriction in ASL

  Semantics and Pragmatics · 2022-01-19 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper investigates a form-meaning mapping in American Sign Language (ASL) whereby pronouns, verbs, and quantifiers can be produced progressively higher in signing space to signal a widening of their contextually supplied domains. We show that this is not a gesture-like expression of surprise, uncertainty, or quantity, and is also not equivalent to well-studied domain-widened quantifiers in spoken language, but rather involves reference via plural pronouns in ASL. When appearing with verbs t…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Focus on demonstratives: Experiments in English and Turkish

  Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory · 2024-01-23 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This paper deals with an unexpected contrast between demonstrative descriptions and definite descriptions on their anaphoric uses. If two (or more) discourse referents are introduced in the preceding sentence, it is perfectly natural to refer to one of them in the following sentence using a definite description. Use of demonstrative descriptions in the same context, however, is degraded, with existing accounts of anaphoric demonstratives and definites providing no explanation for this contrast.…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ivano Caponigro

  University of California, San Diego

  69 shared

• Carlo Geraci

  École Normale Supérieure - PSL

  69 shared

• Onno Crasborn

  Radboud University Nijmegen

  65 shared

• Labex Efl

  Radboud University Nijmegen

  64 shared

• Caterina Donati

  Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle

  64 shared

• Carlo Cecchetto

  64 shared

• Valentina Aristodemo

  University of Trento

  64 shared

• David Sugden

  King's College London

  26 shared

Labs

• Reading GroupsPI

Education

• Ph.D., Linguistics

  Harvard University

  2005

• B.A., Linguistics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1999

Similar researchers at Harvard University

• Kevin Ryanh-84
• Gennaro Chierchiah-43
• Jonathan David Bobaljikh-29