Research

My research explores the cognitive mechanisms underlying language development, specifically in the domain of meaning. I ask how children acquire semantic and pragmatic competence, informed by when they acquire it, what an adult-like competence entails, and the nature of its links to broader cognition. My work has focused on central topics in the study of meaning across cognitive science, such as the acquisition of propositional attitude verbs, presupposition triggers, logical operators and spatial relations. The guiding motivation of my work is to cast new light on classic nature-nurture questions and the division of labor in cognition, by bringing them into the domain of semantic development: Some aspects of semantic competence must be innate in order to explain the ease with which children acquire language, and logical concepts are a good candidate foundation. Nevertheless, input to the language acquisition process is filtered through social interactions, so the child’s pragmatic competence should play a central role in language development.

resources

Dudley, Hacquard & Lidz. (under development). Inputs and Outputs corpus. Involves recordings of naturalistic interactions in a home setting and tasks in a laboratory setting, as well as partial transcriptions of conversations. Includes 67 child participants and their families, with over 120 hours of audio and 75 hours of video recordings. Supported by NSF award # 1628110.

reasoning

Bade, Chung, Picat, Dudley & Mascarenhas. (forthcoming). "Insights into pragmatic strengthening from a new training paradigm." In Journal of Memory and Language.

Dudley, Kovács & Téglás. (2023). "12-month-olds' reasoning via negation." Paper published in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 45. 

Dudley, Chemla & Mascarenhas. “A developmental perspective on the interplay between pragmatic interpretation and reasoning: The case of illusory inferences.” Paper presented at the 9th annual Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development, January 2019.

Hacquard, Dudley & Lidz. "With or without too: Reasoning about people's questions and their presuppositions." Poster presented at 43rd annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston University, November 2018.

presupposition

Dudley, Rowe, Hacquard & Lidz. (2017). “Discovering the factivity of know from its distribution.” Paper published in Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 27.

Dudley. (2017). "The role of input in discovering presuppositions triggers: Figuring out what everybody already knew." Doctoral dissertation.

Dudley, Orita, Hacquard & Lidz. (2015). "Three-year-olds’ understanding of know and think.” Chapter published in Experimental Perspectives on Presuppositions.

attitudes

Dudley & Vogel. (2024) "Knowledge, the concept KNOW, and the word know: considerations from polysemy and pragmatics." Paper published in Synthese.

Dudley & Kovács. (2021). "Do 'knowledge attributions' involve metarepresentation just like belief attributions do?" Commentary published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

Dudley. (2018). "Young children's conception of knowledge." Paper published in Philosophy Compass.

Dudley, Roberts, Rowe, Hacquard & Lidz. "SES differences in input on mental state verbs." Poster presented at 2015 SRCD Biennial Meeting, Philadephia, PA. March 2015.

White, Dudley, Hacquard & Lidz. (2014). “Discovering classes of attitude verbs using subcategorization frame distributions.” Paper published in Proceedings of the 43rd annual meeting of the North East Linguistic Society.

events & relations

Dudley, Kovács & Téglás. (2023). "Testing the Syntax-Semantics Mapping for the Hungarian Inessive in Infancy via Reversible Participant Relations." Paper published in Proceedings of the 47th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. 

Perkins, He, Williams, Dudley, Bjornsdottir & Lidz. "Can intransitive clauses name 2-participant events? A new test of Participant-to-Argument Matching in verb learning." Paper presented at the Events in Language and Cognition workshop associated with the 29th annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, University of Florida. March 2016.

Vogel, Wellwood, Dudley & Ritchie. (2015). “Talking about Causing Events.” Paper published in The Baltic International Yearbook for Cognition, Logic and Communication.

Vogel, Wellwood, Dudley & Ritchie. “Causation in Language and Vision.” Paper presented at the 39th annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Brown University. June 2013. 

imposters

Dudley. (2014). “Spanish Imposters and Verbal Agreement.” Chapter published in Cross-linguistic Studies of Imposters and Pronominal Agreement.

Dudley. (2011). "An Investigation of Spanish Imposters and Verbal Agreement." Undergraduate thesis at New York University.