All Publications - Harvard Laboratory for Developmental Studies

The Development of Online Language Comprehension

Özge, D., Kornfilt, J., Maquate, K., Küntay, A. C., & Snedeker, J. (2022). German-speaking children use sentence-initial case marking for predictive language processing at age four. Cognition, 221, 104988.

Yacovone, A., Shafto, C. L., Worek, A., & Snedeker, J. (2021). Word vs. world knowledge: A developmental shift from bottom-up lexical cues to top-down plausibility. Cognitive Psychology, 131, 101442.

Yacovone, A., Moya, E., & Snedeker, J. (2021). Unexpected words or unexpected languages? Two ERP effects of code-switching in naturalistic discourse. Cognition, 215, 104814.

Huang, Y. & Snedeker, J. (2020). Evidence from the visual world paradigm raises questions about unaccusativity and growth curve analyses. Cognition 200.

Kaplan, Elizabeth, Tanya Levari, and Jesse Snedeker. Eye Tracking and Spoken Language Comprehension: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications. Chapter 31 In Early Childhood Development. IGI Global, 2019.

Rabagliati, H., Delaney-Busch, N., Snedeker, J., & Kuperberg, G. (2019). Spared bottom-up but impaired top-down interactive effects during naturalistic language processing in schizophrenia: evidence from the visual-world paradigm. Psychological Medicine, 49(8), 1335-1345.

Özge, D., Küntay, A., & Snedeker, J. (2019). Why wait for the verb? Turkish speaking children use case markers for incremental language comprehension. Cognition, 183, 152-180.

Paul, P., Ziegler, J., Chalmers, E., & Snedeker, J. (2019). Children and adults successfully comprehend subject-only sentences online. PloS one, 14(1), e0209670.

Li, J., Liu, L., Chalmers, E., & Snedeker, J. (2018). What is in a name?: The development of cross-cultural differences in referential intuitions. Cognition, 171, 108-111.

Reuter, T., Feiman, R., & Snedeker, J. (2018). Getting to No: Pragmatic and Semantic Factors in Two‐and Three‐Year‐Olds’ Understanding of Negation. Child Development, 89(4), e364-e381.

Kaplan, E., Levari, T., & Snedeker, J. (2017). Eye tracking and spoken language comprehension. In Eye-tracking technology applications in educational research (pp. 88-105). IGI Global.

Huang, Y. & Snedeker, J. (2011). Cascading activation across levels of representation in children’s lexical processing. Journal of Child Language, 38, 644-661.

Thothathiri, M. & Snedeker, J. “The role of thematic roles in sentence processing: evidence from structural priming in young children.”

Huang, Y. & Snedeker, J. “The use of referential context in children’s online interpretation of scalar adjectives.”

Huang, Y. & Snedeker, J. (2009). Semantic meaning and pragmatic interpretation in five-year olds: Evidence from real time spoken language comprehension. Developmental Psychology, 45(6),1723-1739.

Snedeker, J. (2009). Children’s Sentence Processing. In E. Bavin (Ed.), The Handbook of Child Language (pp. 331-338). Cambridge University Press.

Language in Autism

Hahn, N., Snedeker, J., & Rabagliati, H. (2015). Rapid linguistic ambiguity resolution in young children with autism spectrum disorder: Eye tracking evidence for the limits of weak central coherence. Autism Research, 8(6), 717-726.

Diehl, J., Friedberg, C., Paul, R & Snedeker, J. (2014). The use of prosody during syntactic processing in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders, Development and Psychopathology. DOI: 10.1017/S0954579414000741.

de Marchena, A., Worek, A., Ono, K., Eigsti, I. & Snedeker, J. (2011). Mutual exclusivity in autism spectrum disorders: Testing the pragmatic hypothesis. Cognition, 119, 96-113.

Language Creation (Nicaraguan Sign Language & Artificial Language Learning)

Kocab, A., Senghas, A., Coppola, M., & Snedeker, J. (2023). Potentially recursive structures emerge quickly when a new language community forms. Cognition, 232, 105261.

Kocab, A., Davidson, K., & Snedeker, J. (2022). The Emergence of Natural Language Quantification. Cognitive Science, 46(2), e13097.

Kocab, A., Ziegler, J., Snedeker, J. (2019) It takes a village: The role of community size in linguistic regularization. Cognitive Psychology, 114 101227.

Kocab, A., Lam, H., & Snedeker, J. (2018). When cars hit trucks and girls hug boys: The effect of animacy on word order in gestural language creation. Cognitive Science, 42(3), 918-938.

Kocab, A., Senghas, A., & Snedeker, J. (2016). The emergence of temporal language in Nicaraguan Sign Language. Cognition, 156, 147-163.

Kocab, A., Senghas, A., & Snedeker, J. (2016). Recursion in Nicaraguan Sign Language. In CogSci.

International Adoption as a Natural Experiment

Coffey, J., Shafto, C. L., Geren, J., & Snedeker, J. (2021). The effects of maternal input on language in the absence of genetic confounds: Vocabulary development in internationally adopted children. Child Development, 93, 237–53.

Snedeker, J., Geren, J. & Shafto, C. (2012). Disentangling the effects of cognitive development and linguistic expertise: A longitudinal study of the acquisition of English in internationally-adopted children. Cognitive Psychology, 65, 39-76. Supplemental Materials

Geren, J., Snedeker, J. & Shafto, C. “The link between language and theory of mind: evidence from internationally adopted children.”

Geren, J., Shafto, C. & Snedeker, J. “Running fast but running behind: language abilities in internationally-adopted children arriving between ages 2 and 9.”

Snedeker, J., Geren, J. & Shafto, C. “Different Paths: Changes in second-language acquisition between three and five years of age.”

Snedeker, J., Geren, J. & Shafto, C. (2007). Starting over: International adoption as a natural experiment in language development. Psychological Science, 18(1), 79-87.

Geren, J., Snedeker, J. & Ax, L. (2005). Starting over: A preliminary study of early lexical and syntactic development in internationally adopted preschoolers. Seminars in Speech and Language, 26(1), 44-53.

Evidence for the Decomposition of Verb Meaning (Semantic Primitives)

Ziegler, J., & Snedeker, J. (2019). The use of syntax and information structure during language comprehension: Evidence from structural priming. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 34(3), 365-384.

Ziegler, J., & Snedeker, J. (2018). How broad are thematic roles? Evidence from structural priming. Cognition, 179, 221-240.

Ziegler, J., Snedeker, J., & Wittenberg, E. (2018). Event structures drive semantic structural priming, not thematic roles: Evidence from idioms and light verbs. Cognitive Science, 42(8), 2918-2949.

Kline, M., Snedeker, J., & Shultz, L. (2017). Linking language and events: Spatiotemporal cues drive children’s expectations about the meanings of novel transitive verbs. Language Learning and Development, 13(1), 1-23.

Wittenberg, E., Khan, M., & Snedeker, J. (2017). Investigating thematic roles through implicit learning: Evidence from light verb constructions. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1089.

Ziegler, J., Snedeker, J., & Wittenberg, E. (2017). Priming is swell, but it’s far from simple. Comments on Branigan & Pickering (2017). Brain and Behavioral Sciences, 40, e312.

Hartshorne, J. K., O’Donnell, T. J., Sudo, Y., Uruwashi, M., Lee, M., & Snedeker, J. (2016). Psych verbs, the linking problem, and the acquisition of language. Cognition, 157, 268-288.

Hartshorne, J. K., Pogue, A., & Snedeker, J. (2015). Love is hard to understand: The relationship between transitivity and caused events in the acquisition of emotion verbs. Journal of Child Language, 42(3), 467–504. doi:10.1017/S0305000914000178

Hartshorne, J. K., & Snedeker, J. (2012). Verb argument structure predicts implicit causality: The advantages of finer-grained semantics. Language and Cognitive Processes, 1-35.

Word Learning and Concepts

Review Articles

Barner, D., Li, P. & Snedeker, J. (2010). Words as windows to thought: the case of object representation. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1-6.

Snedeker, J. (2009). Word Learning. In L. R. Squire (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Neuroscience (pp. 503-508). Amsterdam: Elsevier

Novel Word – Novel Concept Learning

Ahn, D., & Snedeker, J. (2022). Early Acquisition of Plural Morphology in a Classifier Language: Data from Korean 2-4 Year Olds. Language Learning and Development, 18(1), 1–15.

de Marchena, A., Worek, A., Ono, K., Eigsti, I. & Snedeker, J. (2011). Mutual exclusivity in autism spectrum disorders: Testing the pragmatic hypothesis. Cognition, 119, 96-113.

Huang, Y. T., Spelke, E. S., & Snedeker, J. (2010). When is four far more than three? Children’s generalization of newly acquired number words. Psychological Science, 21, 600-606.

Zinchenko, E. & Snedeker, J. “The role of functions and motor actions in early tool concepts.”

Barner, D. & Snedeker, J. (2008). Compositionality and statistics in adjective acquisition: 4-year olds interpret tall and short based on the size distributions of novel noun referents. Child Development, 79(3), 594-608.

Havasi, C. & Snedeker, J. (2004). The Adaptability of Language-Specific Verb Lexicalization Biases. Proceedings of the Twenty-sixth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Mahwah, NJ, USA: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Human Simulations

Medina, T.N., Snedeker, J., Trueswell, J.C., & Gleitman, L.R. (2011). How words can and cannot be learned by observation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108: 9014-9019.

Snedeker, J. & Gleitman, L. (2004). Why it is hard to label our concepts. In D. G. Hall & S. R. Waxman (Eds.), Weaving a Lexicon (pp. 257-294). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Snedeker, J., Li, P. & Yuan, S. (2003). Cross-Cultural Differences in the Input to Early Word Learning. Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Mahwah, NJ, USA: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Snedeker, J., Brent, L. & Gleitman, L. (2001). The changing character of the mental lexicon: An information-based account of early word learning. Unpublished manuscript.

Snedeker, J. & Li, P. (2000). Can the situations in which words occur account for cross-linguistic variation in vocabulary composition? In J Tai. & Y. Chang (Eds.), Proceedings of the Seventh International Symposium on Chinese Languages and Linguistics.

Snedeker, J. (2000). Cross-situational observation and the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis. In E. Clark (Ed.), Proceedings of the Thirtieth Annual Child Language Research Forum. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.

Snedeker, J., Gleitman, L. & Brent, M. (1999). The successes and failures of word-to-world mapping. In A. Greenhill, M. Hughs, H. Littlefield, & H. Walsh (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-third Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Other Online Resources

Niyogi, S. & Snedeker, J. (2005). Solutions to Fodor’s problem of concept acquisition. Twenty-seventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Stresa, Italy, July 2005. (transcript)

Structural Priming

Ziegler, J., Morato, R. & Snedeker, J. (2019). Priming semantic structure in Brazilian Portuguese. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science 3, 25–37 https://doi.org/10.1007/s41809-019-00022-8

Ziegler, J., Bencini, G., Goldberg, A., & Snedeker, J. (2019). How abstract is syntax? Evidence from structural priming. Cognition, 193, 104045. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104045

Ziegler, J., & Snedeker, J. (2018). How broad are thematic roles? Evidence from structural priming. Cognition, 179, 221-240.

Ziegler, J., Snedeker, J., & Wittenberg, E. (2017). Priming is swell, but it’s far from simple. Comments on Branigan & Pickering (2017). Brain and Behavioral Sciences, 40, e312.

Thothathiri, M., Snedeker, J. & Hannon, E. (2012). Distributional category learning by 12-month-old infants: an investigation into the role of prosody and distributional frames. Infant and Child Development, 21(2), 135–145, DOI: 10.1002/icd.734

Thothathiri, M. & Snedeker, J. (2010). The role of thematic roles in sentence processing: evidence from structural priming in young children. Harvard University Department of Psychology.

Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics

Presuppositions

Romoli, J., Khan, M., Sudo, Y., & Snedeker, J. (2015). Resolving temporary referential ambiguity using presupposed content. In Schwarz, F. (Ed.),Experimental Perspectives on Presuppositions (pp. 67-87). Springer International Publishing.

Romoli, J., Sudo, Y. and Snedeker, J. (2012). An Experimental Investigation of Presupposition Projection in Conditional Sentences. In Neil Ashton, Anca Chereches, and David Lutz (eds.) Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 21.

Scalar Implicature: Online Processing and Acquisition

Huang, Y. T., & Snedeker, J. (2018). Some inferences still take time: Prosody, predictability, and the speed of scalar implicatures. Cognitive psychology, 102, 105-126.

Hartshorne, J. K., Snedeker, J., Liem Azar, S. Y. M., & Kim, A. E. (2015). The neural computation of scalar implicature Language, Cognition and Neuroscience,30(5), 620-634. DOI:10.1080/23273798.2014.981195

Hartshorne, J. K., & Snedeker, J. (2014). The speed of inference: Evidence against rapid use of context in calculation of scalar implicatures. Manuscript submitted for publication.

Huang, Y., Spelke, E. S., & Snedeker, J. (2013). What exactly do number words mean? Language Learning and Development, 9(2), 105-129. (Please cite this paper when using the covered box task. Includes data on the interpretation of numbers and scalar quantifiers in two and three year olds).

Huang, Y. & Snedeker, J. (2011). Logic and conversation revisited: Evidence for a division between semantic and pragmatic content in real-time language comprehension. Language and Cognitive Processes, 26(8), 1161-1172.

Huang, Y. & Snedeker, J. (2009). Online interpretation of scalar quantifiers: Insight into the semantics–pragmatics interface. Cognitive Psychology, 58(3), 376-415.

Huang, Y. & Snedeker, J. (2009). Semantic meaning and pragmatic interpretation in five-year olds: Evidence from real time spoken language comprehension. Developmental Psychology, 45(6),1723-1739.

The Meaning and Acquisition of Number Words

Huang, Y. T., Spelke, E. S., & Snedeker, J. (2010). When is four far more than three? Children’s generalization of newly acquired number words. Psychological Science, 21, 600-606.

Panizza, D., Chierchia, G., Huang, Y., & Snedeker, J. (2009). The Relevance of Polarity for the Online Interpretation of Scalar Terms. The Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 19, Columbus, OH.

Psych Verbs and Implicit Causality

Hartshorne, J. K., O’Donnell, T. J., Sudo, Y., Uruwashi, M., Lee, M., & Snedeker, J. (2016). Psych verbs, the linking problem, and the acquisition of language. Cognition, 157, 268-288.

Hartshorne, J. K., Pogue, A., & Snedeker, J. (2015). Love is hard to understand: The relationship between transitivity and caused events in the acquisition of emotion verbs. To appear in Journal of Child Language.

Hartshorne, J. K., & Snedeker, J. (2012). Verb argument structure predicts implicit causality: The advantages of finer-grained semantics. Language and Cognitive Processes, 1-35.

Polysemy

Srinivasan, M. & Snedeker, J. (2014). Polysemy and the taxonomic constraint: Children’s representation of words that label multiple kinds, Language Learning and Development, 10(2), 97-128. DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2013.820121

Rabagliati, H. & Snedeker, J. (2013). The truth about chickens and bats: Ambiguity avoidance distinguishes types of polysemy. Psychological Science. 24, 1354-1360.

Srinivasan, M., & Snedeker, J. (2011). Judging a book by its cover and its contents: The representation of polysemous and homophonous meanings in four-year-old children. Cognitive Psychology, 62, 245-272.

Mass-count Distinction

Barner, D., Li, P. & Snedeker, J. (2010). Words as windows to thought: the case of object representation. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1-6.

Barner, D., Wagner, L. & Snedeker, J. (2008). Events and the ontology of individuals: Verbs as a source of individuating nouns. Cognition, 106(2), 1-6.

Barner, D. & Snedeker, J. (2006). Children’s Early Understanding of Mass-Count Syntax: Individuation, Lexical Content, and the Number Asymmetry Hypothesis. Language Learning and Development, 2(3), 163-194.

Barner, D. & Snedeker, J. (2005). Quantity judgments and individuation: Evidence that mass nouns count. Cognition, 97, 163-194.

Adjectives

Huang, Y. & Snedeker, J. (2013). The use of referential context in children’s online interpretation of scalar adjectives. Developmental Psychology, 49(6), 1090-1102.

Prosody

Huang, Y. T., & Snedeker, J. (2018). Some inferences still take time: Prosody, predictability, and the speed of scalar implicatures. Cognitive Psychology, 102, 105-126.

Diehl, J., Friedberg, C., Paul, R & Snedeker, J. (2014). The use of prosody during syntactic processing in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders. Development and Psychopathology. DOI: 10.1017/S0954579414000741.

Snedeker, J. & Casserly, E. (2010). Is it all relative? Effects of prosodic boundaries on the comprehension and production of attachment ambiguities. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25(7-9), 1234-1264.

Snedeker, J. & Yuan, S. (2008). Effects of prosodic and lexical constraints on parsing in young children (and adults). Journal of Memory and Language, 58(2), 574-608.

Snedeker, J. & Trueswell, J. (2003). Using prosody to avoid ambiguity: Effects of speaker awareness and referential context. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 103-130.

Nakassis, C. & Snedeker, J. (2002). Beyond sarcasm: Intonation and context as relational cues in children’s recognition of irony. In A. Greenhill, M. Hughs, H. Littlefield, & H. Walsh (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-sixth Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.