Cognitive Psychology

Anna Papafragou

		Assistant Professor Ph.D., University College of London Research Interests Recent Publications Representative Publications Vita -PDF Website papafragou@psych.udel.edu Office: 109 Wolf Hall (302) 831-2752 (302) 831-3645 -fax Lab: 401 Wolf Hall (302) 831-8827 Preferred contact method - email

Research Interests

Psycholinguistics, language acquisition; language and cognition

Research Summary:

How do children learn language? How do adults process the linguistic structures they hear? And how do categories of linguistic meaning relate to categories in nonlinguistic cognition in both children and adults? Research in my lab approaches these topics with a range of formal tools drawn from linguistic theories of meaning and empirical methods from developmental psycholinguistics. Some of the languages we have studied include English, Greek, Korean and Tseltal (Mayan).  Specific areas of interest include the linguistic and cognitive representation of motion and space, quantity and number and mental states in both adults and children.

Recent Publications

Trueswell, J. A., Papafragou and Y. Choi (in press). Syntactic and referential processes: What develops? To appear in E. Gibson and N. Perlmutter (eds.), The Processing and Acquisition of Reference. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Papafragou, A. and N. Schwarz (2005/6). Most wanted. Language Acquisition 13, 207-251.

Papafragou, A. (2005). Relations between language and thought: Individuation and the count/mass distinction. In C. Lefebvre and H. Cohen (eds.), Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science, Elsevier Science.

Papafragou, A. and N. Tantalou (2004). Children’s computation of implicatures. In press, Language Acquisition, 12, 71-82.  

Representative Publications

Gleitman, L. and A. Papafragou (2005). Language and thought. In K. Holyoak and B. Morrison (eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Papafragou, A. and J. Musolino (2003). Scalar implicatures: Experiments at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Cognition, 86, 253-282.

Papafragou, A., C. Massey and L. Gleitman (2002).Shake, rattle, 'n' roll: The representation of motion in language and cognition. Cognition, 84, 189-219.

Papafragou, A. (2002). Mindreading and verbal communication. Mind and Language, 17, 55-67.

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