Research Findings

Introduction

The Cognition, Language & Learning Lab at Stanford University is directed by Professor Michael Ramscar.

In the following summaries, we try to simplify and explain our research findings to make them more accessible to the general public. Wherever possible, we situate our work in the context of some of the big questions about mind and language. Many of the following summaries have been written by current and past undergraduate Research Assistants with the lab. We encourage you to browse the summaries below and our Video Library. For the most up to date and theoretically rigorous work, please also check out our Research Publications.

Great Debates

-- Innateness versus Empiricism

-- Rethinking Reference

Language Learning

-- Language and Associative Learning

-- No Representation without Taxation

-- Language as a Predictive Process

-- Modeling Language as Prediction

Experimental Application

PDF -- The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition

-- Grammatical Gender

-- Fictive Motion

-- Learning Color Words

PDF -- Development of Cognitive Control

PDF -- Response Conflict Resolution

Students and Summaries

Student Involvement

The research summaries here have been prepared by undergraduate research assistants in the lab. Over the last year, RAs have worked on a wide array of topics and research projects with Prof Ramscar and our grad students. Some of these topics include: stereotype threat, semantic priming and prediction, chunk frequency and comprehensibility, pitch categorization, facial distinctiveness, delay of gratification, word learning, literary judgement in Mandarin and English, semantic similarity in relation to distributional context, prefixing and suffixing in Spanish, eyetracking infants in the A-not-B task, parsing malapropisms, and probability and number learning in children. Several of our undergraduate RAs will be submitting to student and professional conferences this year. For more information about our lab team, please visit the Ramscar henchmen page.