Research
Research
I am broadly interested in how children learn and process language in real time, and in the developmental mechanisms that allow them to integrate new linguistic information so quickly. My work focuses on children as young as 18 months through early school-age years.
I investigate how children adapt to recent linguistic experiences, resolve ambiguities in sentence comprehension, and leverage both lexical cues and event-based inferences to guide their language processing.
Children’s syntactic knowledge is constantly in flux as they encounter new input. In addition, children face the challenge of disambiguating sentences that can be interpreted in multiple ways. Utterances like “Tickle the bunny with the sponge” require them to decide whether the prepositional phrase attaches to the verb or the noun. Understanding how quickly and flexibly children can form one interpretation and then shift to another offers insights into the adaptability of the developing language system, and raises larger questions about how children generalize from a handful of experiences to guide future comprehension, and how different information sources interact with each other to resolve these ambiguities.
This process of syntactic adaptation likely starts earlier than previously found, helping even toddlers make sense of novel words that they have never heard before. By examining how children adapt to regularities in syntactic environments—such as when a familiar phrase is followed by nouns versus verbs—we can better understand how recent exposure to ambiguous syntactic structures can lead to significant changes in subsequent comprehension and word learning.
Publications and Manuscripts:
Yu, Y., Havron, N., & Fisher, C. (2025). Syntactic adaptation and word learning in 3- to 4-year-olds. Language Learning, 75(1), 117–145. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12661
Yu, Y., Havron, N., Waxman, S., & Fisher C. (in prep). Syntactic adaptation is retained over time to guide word learning in preschool children.
Yu, Y., Havron, N., Waxman, S., & Fisher C. (in prep). Syntactic adaptation guides word learning in 24-month-olds and 18-month-olds.
Conference Presentations:
Yu, Y., Havron, N., Waxman, S., Fisher, C. (2023, November). Adaptation to recent linguistic experience guides new word learning in toddlers. Poster at 48th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.
Yu, Y., Havron, N., Waxman, S., Fisher, C. (2023, March). Syntactic adaptation and long-term retention guide word learning in toddlers. Poster at 36th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing.
Another key area of my research focuses on how children process and predict language in real time. Rather than waiting for an entire sentence to finish, they begin forming expectations about what might come next based on partial information or hints from the broader discourse. Eye-tracking studies provide a window into how these rapid, incremental predictions unfold.
My work in this area examines how children link verb meanings to situation models of who did what and why, and how they build rich mental models that guide comprehension and learning. By focusing on how children align language with the context they observe or recall, we can gain insights into the interplay between linguistic cues and real-world knowledge that enables children to construct meaning so effectively.
Publications and Manuscripts:
Yu, Y., Yuile, A. R., Ishak, D., & Fisher, C. (2025). 4- and 5-year-olds integrate verb knowledge with situation models in online reference resolution. Proceedings of the 49th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 746–759. https://www.lingref.com/bucld/49/BUCLD49-56.pdf
Conference Presentations:
Yu, Y., Yuile, A. R., Ishak, D., & Fisher, C. (2024, November). 4- and 5-year-olds integrate verb knowledge with situation models in online reference resolution. Talk at the 49th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.
Yu, Y., Yuile, A. R., Ishak, D., & Fisher, C. (2024, May). Preschoolers’ use of verb and event knowledge in online reference comprehension. Poster at the 37th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing.