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2022
Weihs, L., Yuile, A., Baillargeon, R., Fisher, C., Marcus, G., Mottaghi, R., & Kembhavi, A. (2022). Benchmarking progress to infant-level physical reasoning in AI. Transactions on Machine Learning Research. https://openreview.net/forum?id=9NjqD9i48M
2021
Huebner, P.A., Sulem, E., Fisher, C., & Roth, D. (2021). BabyBERTa: Learning More Grammar With Small-Scale Child-Directed Language. CoNLL 2021.
Lin, Y., Li, J., Gertner, Y., Ng, W., Fisher, C. L., & Baillargeon, R. (2021). How do the object-file and physical-reasoning systems interact? Evidence from priming effects with object arrays or novel labels. Cognitive Psychology, 125, 101368.
Yoon, S., Jin, K., Brown-Schmidt, S., & Fisher, C. (2021). What’s new to you? Preschoolers’ partner-specific online processing of disfluency. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 612601. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.612601 [This article is part of a Research Topic entitled Perspective Taking in Language.]
2020
Fisher, C., Jin, K., & Scott, R.M. (2019). The developmental origins of syntactic bootstrapping. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12, 48-77.
Qi, Z., Love, J., Fisher, C., & Brown-Schmidt, S. (2020). Referential context and executive functioning influence children’s resolution of syntactic ambiguity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 46, 1922–1947.
Yoon, S., & Fisher, C. (2020). Children’s attribution of disfluency to different sources. In Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Virtual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
2018
Messenger, K., & Fisher, C. (2018). Mistakes weren’t made: Three-year-olds’ comprehension of novel-verb passives provides evidence for early abstract syntax. Cognition, 178, 118-132.
Moon, L., Christodoulopoulos, C., Fisher, C., Franco, S., & Roth, D. (2018). Gold standard annotations for preposition and verb sense with semantic role labels in Adult-child interactions. Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2018).
Scott, R., Gertner, Y, & Fisher, C. (2018). Not all subjects are agents: Transitivity and meaning in early language comprehension. In K. Syrett & S. Arunachalam (Eds.), Semantics in acquisition (pp. 154-176). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
2017
Lin, Yi., & Fisher, Cynthia (2017). Error-based learning: A mechanism for linking verbs to syntax. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
2016
Christodoulopoulos, C., Roth, D., & Fisher, C. (2016). An incremental model of syntactic bootstrapping. Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning, pp. 38–43. Berlin, Germany, August 11, 2016.
Lukyanenko, C., & Fisher, C. (2016). Where are the cookies? Two- and three-year-olds use number-marked verbs to anticipate upcoming nouns. Cognition, 146, 349-370.
2015
Messenger, K., Yuan, S., & Fisher, C. (2015). Learning Verb Syntax via Listening: New Evidence From 22-Month-Olds. Language Learning and Development, 11, 356–368.
2010-2014
Dautriche, I., Cristia, A., Brusini, P., Yuan, S., Fisher, C., & Christophe, A. (2014). Toddlers Default to Canonical Surface‐to‐Meaning Mapping When Learning Verbs. Child development, 85, 1168-1180.
Jin, K. & Fisher, C. (2014). Early evidence for syntactic bootstrapping: 15-month-olds use sentence structure in verb learning. In W. Orman & M.J. Valleau (Eds.), BUCLD 38 Online Proceedings Supplement. http://www.bu.edu/bucld/supplementvol38/
Lukyanenko, C., & Fisher, C. (2014). 30-Month-Olds Use Verb Agreement Features in Online Sentence Processing. In W. Orman & M.J. Valleau (Eds.), BUCLD 38: Proceedings of the 38th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 292-305). Boston, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Song, H. J., Baillargeon, R., & Fisher, C. (2014). The Development of Infants’ Use of Novel Verbal Information when Reasoning about Others’ Actions. PloS one, 9(3), e92387.
Connor, M., Fisher, C., & Roth, D. (2013). Starting from scratch in Semantic Role Labeling: Early indirect supervision. In T. Poibeau, A. Villavicencio, A. Korhonen, and A. Alishahi (Eds.), Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition, pp. 257-296. Berlin: Springer.
Gertner, Y. & Fisher, C. (2012). Predicted errors in children’s early sentence comprehension. Cognition, 124, 85-94.
Scott, R. M., & Fisher, C. (2012). 2.5-year-olds use cross-situational consistency to learn verbs under referential uncertainty. Cognition, 122, 163-180
Yuan, S., Fisher, C., & Snedeker, J. (2012). Counting the nouns: Simple structural cues to verb meaning. Child Development, 83, 1382-1399.
Chambers, K. E., Onishi, K. H., & Fisher, C. (2011). Representations for phonotactic learning in infancy. Language Learning and Development, 7, 287-308.
Connor, M., Fisher, C., & Roth, D. (2011). Online Latent Structure Training for Language Acquisition. Proc. of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) – 2011
Qi, Z., Yuan, S., & Fisher, C. (2011). Where does verb bias come from? Experience with particular verbs affects online sentence processing. Proceedings of the 35th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Boston, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Yuan, S., Fisher, C., Kandhadai, P., & Fernald, A. (2011). You can stipe the pig and nerk the fork: Learning to use verbs to predict nouns. Proceedings of the 35th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Boston, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Chambers, K. E., Onishi, K. H., & Fisher, C. (2010). A vowel is a vowel: Generalizing newly-learned phonotactic constraints to new contexts. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 36, 821–828.
Connor, M., Gertner, Y., Fisher, C., & Roth, D. (2010). Starting from scratch in Semantic Role Labeling. Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 989–998.
Fisher, C., Gertner, Y., Scott, R., & Yuan, S. (2010). Syntactic bootstrapping. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 1, 143-149.
2005-2009
Connor, M., Gertner, Y., Fisher, C., & Roth, D. (2009). Minimally Supervised Model of Early Language Acquisition. Proc. of the Annual Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL).
Scott, R. M. & Fisher, C. (2009). 2-year-olds use distributional cues to interpret transitivity-alternating verbs. Language and Cognitive Processes, 24, 777-803.
Warker, J. A., Xu, Y., Dell, G. S., & Fisher, C. (2009). Speech errors reflect the phonotactic constraints in recently spoken syllables, but not in recently heard syllables. Cognition, 112, 81-96.
Yuan, S. & Fisher, C. (2009). “Really? She blicked the baby?”: Two-year-olds learn combinatorial facts about verbs by listening. Psychological Science, 20, 619 – 626.
Connor, M., Gertner, Y., Fisher, C., & Roth, D. (2008). Baby SRL: Modeling Early Language Acquisition. Proc. of the Annual Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL).
Song, H., Onishi, K. H., Baillargeon, R., & Fisher, C. (2008). Can an agent’s false belief be corrected by an appropriate communication? Psychological reasoning in 18-month-old infants. Cognition, 109, 295-315.
Song, H., & Fisher, C. (2007). Discourse prominence effects on 2.5-year-old children’s interpretation of pronouns. Lingua, 117, 1959-1987. (part of a special issue on discourse processing)
Fisher, C., & Song, H. (2006). Who’s the subject? Sentence structures as analogs of verb meaning. To appear in K. Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, R. M. (Eds.) Action meets word: How children learn the meanings of verbs. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fisher, C., Klingler, S. L., & Song, H. (2006). What does syntax say about space? 26-month-olds use sentence structure in learning spatial terms. Cognition, 101, B19-B29.
Gertner, Y., Fisher, C., & Eisengart, J. (2006). Learning words and rules: Abstract knowledge of word order in early sentence comprehension. Psychological Science, 17, 684-691.
Gleitman, L. R., & Fisher, C. (2005). Universal aspects of word learning. In J. McGilvray (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky, Cambridge University Press.
Song, H. & Fisher, C. (2005). Who’s “she”? Discourse structure influences preschoolers’ pronoun interpretation. Journal of Memory & Language, 52, 29-57.
Song, H., Baillargeon, R., & Fisher, C. (2005). Can infants attribute to an agent a disposition to perform a particular action? Cognition, 98, B45-B55
2000-2004
Fisher, C., Church, B. A., & Chambers, K. (2004). Learning to identify spoken words. In D. G. Hall & S. R. Waxman (Eds.), Weaving a lexicon (pp. 3-40). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chambers, K. E., Onishi, K. H., & Fisher, C. (2003). Infants learn phonotactic regularities from brief auditory experience, Cognition, 87, B69-B77.
Fisher, C. (2003). Syntax acquisition. In W. Frawley (Ed.) and E. Clark (Section Ed.) Oxford Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Second Edition. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fisher, C. (2002). Structural limits on verb mapping: The role of abstract structure in 2.5-year-olds’ interpretations of novel verbs. Developmental Science, 5,56–65.
Fisher, C. (2002). The role of abstract syntactic knowledge in language acquisition: A reply to Tomasello (2000). Cognition, 82, 259-278.
Fisher, C., & Gleitman, L. R. (2002). Language acquisition. In Pashler, H. (Series Ed), Gallistel, R. (Volume Ed), Steven’s handbook of experimental psychology (3rd ed.), Vol. 3: Learning, motivation, and emotion. (pp. 445-496). New York: Wiley.
Onishi, K. H., Chambers, K. E., & Fisher, C. (2002). Learning phonotactic constraints from brief auditory experience. Cognition, 83, B13-B23.
Fisher, C. (2001). Partial sentence structure as an early constraint on language acquisition. In B. Landau, J. Sabini, J. Jonides, & E. L. Newport (Eds.), Perception, Cognition, and Language: Essays in honor of Henry and Lila Gleitman (pp. 275-290). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fisher, C., & Church, B. A. (2001). Implicit memory support for language acquisition. In J. Weissenborn & B. Hoehle (Eds.), Approaches to bootstrapping: Phonological, lexical, syntactic, and neurophysiological aspects of early language acquisition (pp. 47-69). Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Fisher, C., Hunt, C. M., Chambers, K., & Church, B. A. (2001). Abstraction and specificity in preschoolers’ representations of novel spoken words. Journal of Memory & Language, 45, 665-687.
Fisher, C. (2000). From form to meaning: A role for structural analogy in the acquisition of language. In H. W. Reese (Ed.), Advances in Child Development and Behavior, Vol. 27 (pp. 1-53). New York: Academic Press.
1990-1999
Church, B. A., & Fisher, C., (1998). Long-term auditory word priming in preschoolers: Implicit memory support for language acquisition. Journal of Memory and Language, 39, 523-542.
Fisher, C. (1996). Structural limits on verb mapping: The role of analogy in children’s interpretation of sentences. Cognitive Psychology, 31, 41-81.
Fisher, C., & Tokura, H. (1996). Acoustic cues to linguistic structure in speech to infants: Cross-linguistic evidence. Child Development, 67, 3192-3218.
Fisher, C., & Tokura, H. (1996). Prosody in speech to infants: Direct and indirect acoustic cues to syntactic structure. In J. Morgan & C. Demuth (Eds.), Signal to Syntax: Bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Fisher, C., & Tokura, H. (1995). The given/new contract in speech to infants. Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 287-310.
Fisher, C. (1994). Structure and meaning in the verb lexicon: Input for a syntax-aided verb learning procedure. Language and Cognitive Processes, 9, 473-518.
Fisher, C., Hall, D. G., Rakowitz, S., & Gleitman, L. R. (1994). When it is better to receive than to give: Syntactic and conceptual constraints on vocabulary growth. Lingua, 92, 333-375. [Reprinted in L. R. Gleitman & B. Landau (Eds.), The Acquisition of the Lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.]
Fisher, C., Gleitman, L. R., & Gleitman, H. (1991). On the semantic content of subcategorization frames. Cognitive Psychology, 23, 331-392.