Kristen Syrett

About

Kristen Syrett is the Department Chair and a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Rutgers University. Her research interests include language acquisition, experimental semantics and pragmatics, psycholinguistics, and the syntax/semantics interface. She is involved in academic leadership and contributes to the field through her scholarly work and teaching. Her office is located in Room 304, and she conducts her office hours by appointment.

Research topics

• Linguistics
• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Natural Language Processing
• Mathematics education
• Programming language
• Developmental psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• Supporting adjective learning by children with Developmental Language Disorder: Enhancing metalinguistic approaches

  International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders · 2022 · 13 citations

  BACKGROUND: Adjectives are essential for communication, conceptual development and academic success. However, they are semantically and syntactically complex and can be particularly challenging for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Surprisingly, language interventions have not typically focused on this important word class. AIMS: system can be adapted to support adjective learning in DLD; and (3) to provide practical recommendations on how to support adjective learning in clin…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Gender Bias in Linguistics Textbooks: Has Anything Changed Since Macaulay & Brice 1997?

  Language · 2021 · 10 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Macaulay and Brice (1997:798) surveyed example sentences in eleven syntax textbooks published from 1969–1994 and found that virtually all of the authors ‘favor male-gendered NPs as subjects and agents, and regularly stereotype both genders’. In this article, we address the question of whether constructed example sentences in more recent textbooks show similar gender bias. We present an analysis of six syntax textbooks published from 2005–2017, from which we randomly sampled 200 example sentences…

  PublisherDOI

• The semantics of questions

  Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Cognitive Science · 2019-07-26 · 10 citations

  reviewSenior author

  Pinning down the semantics of questions poses a challenge for the study of meaning. Unlike most declarative statements, questions cannot be assigned a truth value. They do not assert information about the world that can be easily verified as true or false, or accepted or rejected. Instead, their function as a speech act is to interrogate, to seek information about the world. Thus a truth-conditional approach to the semantics of questions runs into a dead end. We must therefore evaluate the seman…

  PublisherDOI

• Crying helps, but being sad doesn’t: Infants constrain nominal reference online using known verbs, but not known adjectives

  Cognition · 2019-08-09 · 10 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Context sensitivity and the semantics of count nouns in the evaluation of partial objects by children and adults

  Journal of Child Language · 2022 · 7 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press. Previous research has documented that children count spatiotemporally-distinct partial objects as if they were whole objects. This behavior extends beyond counting to inclusion of partial objects in assessment and comparisons of quantities. Multiple accounts of this performance have been proposed: children and adults differ qualitatively in their conceptual representations, children lack the processing skills to immediatel…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Doctoral Dissertation Research: Linguistic cues and speaker goals in the question/answer exchange

  NSF · $12k · 2019–2021

• NIH Grant F32HD057699

  NIH · $130k · 2011

Frequent coauthors

• Liliana Sánchez

  University of Illinois Chicago

  21 shared

• Christina Germak

  Rutgers Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

  19 shared

• Hannah Baker

  Florida International University

  19 shared

• Silvia Perez‐Cortes

  Camden County College

  19 shared

• Anthony Arias-Amaya

  Rütgers (Germany)

  19 shared

• Anne Lingwall

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  19 shared

• Jennifer Austin

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  14 shared

• Julien Musolino

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  10 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Linguistics

  Northwestern University

  2007

Similar researchers at Rutgers University

• Ryan Walter Smithh-43
• Mark Bakerh-41
• Viviane Déprezh-35