Lisa Pearl

About

Lisa S. Pearl is the Principal Investigator and Director of CoLaLab at UC Irvine, focusing on the computation of language. Her research interests include language acquisition, with particular attention to syntactic categories, pragmatics, and the cognitive processes underlying language development. She has contributed to interdisciplinary dialogues about language development, collaborating with developmental psychologists, linguists, and computational modelers. Her work involves understanding how children acquire syntax, semantics, and pragmatic skills, often employing quantitative and computational approaches to analyze language learning processes. Pearl's research also explores the impact of socioeconomic factors on language development and the mechanisms of language processing in both typical and clinical populations.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Mathematics
• Linguistics
• Political Science
• Natural Language Processing
• Psychology
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Cognitive science

Selected publications

• Modeling syntactic acquisition

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023 · 24 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Informative computational modeling can be an invaluable tool for understanding syntactic acquisition. In this chapter, I describe how modeling can be used to both formalize specific proposals about syntactic acquisition and empirically evaluate those proposals. I then review several approaches to a key aspect of a model’s inference process: how the modeled learner updates the underlying representations, based on the data encountered. I survey several syntactic acquisition models (both p…

  PublisherDOI

• Poverty of the Stimulus Without Tears

  Language Learning and Development · 2021 · 20 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Poverty of the stimulus has been at the heart of ferocious and tear-filled debates at the nexus of psychology, linguistics, and philosophy for decades. This review is intended as a guide for readers without a formal linguistics or philosophy background, focusing on what poverty of the stimulus is and how it’s been interpreted, which is traditionally where the tears have come in. I discuss poverty of the stimulus from the perspective of language development, highlighting how poverty of the stimul…

  PublisherDOI

• Theory and predictions for the development of morphology and syntax: A Universal Grammar + statistics approach

  Journal of Child Language · 2021 · 16 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  The key aim of this special issue is to make developmental theory proposals concrete enough to evaluate with empirical data. With this in mind, I discuss proposals from the "Universal Grammar + statistics" (UG+stats) perspective for learning several morphology and syntax phenomena. I briefly review why UG has traditionally been part of many developmental theories of language, as well as common statistical learning approaches that are part of UG+stats proposals. I then discuss each morphology or…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Using linguistically defined specific details to detect deception across domains

  Natural Language Engineering · 2019-08-01 · 14 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Current automatic deception detection approaches tend to rely on cues that are based either on specific lexical items or on linguistically abstract features that are not necessarily motivated by the psychology of deception. Notably, while approaches relying on such features can do well when the content domain is similar for training and testing, they suffer when content changes occur. We investigate new linguistically defined features that aim to capture specific details, a psychologica…

  PublisherDOI

• When pragmatics matters more for truth-value judgments: An investigation of quantifier scope ambiguity

  Glossa a journal of general linguistics · 2021-08-15 · 9 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Investigations of linguistic meaning rely crucially on truth-value judgments, which assess whether a sentence can truthfully describe a given scenario. In investigations of language acquisition, truth-value judgments are used to assess both the target knowledge adults have and the developing knowledge children have at different ages. On the basis of truth-value judgments, researchers have concluded that differences between how children resolve ambiguous utterances and how adults do so persist un…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: An Integrated Theory of Syntactic Acquisition - Realistic input, quantitatively defined target states, and computational models of the learning strategy

  NSF · $142k · 2014–2017

• Testing the Universal Grammar Hypothesis

  NSF · $177k · 2009–2013

Frequent coauthors

• Ivano Caponigro

  University of California, San Diego

  24 shared

• David Barner

  21 shared

• Neon Brooks

  Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research

  21 shared

• Jon Sprouse

  New York University Abu Dhabi

  14 shared

• Gregory Scontras

  University of California, Irvine

  7 shared

• Mark Steyvers

  6 shared

• Lawrence Phillips

  6 shared

• Bonnie J. Dorr

  5 shared

Labs

• CoLaLabPI

Similar researchers at University of California, Irvine

• Xin Xieh-93
• Gregory Hickokh-65
• Richard Futrellh-34