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Education
Ph.D., Indiana University 1996 (Developmental Psychology)
Professional Experience
Post-doctoral Fellow, University of Chicago 1996-98
Research Interests
My research interests concern the development of language in infants and young children. My primary focus is the study of word retrieval processes. The questions I ask concern how the emerging lexicon is organized, how it operates, and how it changes with vocabulary growth.
In longitudinal studies of children’s vocabulary acquisition, I have found that naming errors are frequent in the beginning word learner. These errors often involve familiar words for familiar objects and suggest a fragility of processes associated with retrieving words from a rapidly expanding lexicon. This discovery may bring coherence to a set of related phenomena that includes the gap between word comprehension and word production, the onset of the vocabulary spurt, and fast-mapping. I use a dynamic systems framework to show how each of these events is likely to be solvable by the same basic mechanism.
Representative Publications
Gershkoff-Stowe, L. & Hahn, E. R. (in press). Fast mapping skills in the developing lexicon. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research.
Gershkoff-Stowe, L., Connell, B., & Smith, L. (2006). Priming overgeneralizations in 2- and 4-year-old children. Journal of Child Language, 33(3), 1-26.
Gershkoff-Stowe, L. (2005). Imposing equivalence on things in the world: A dynamic systems perspective. In L. Gershkoff-Stowe & D. H. Rakison (Eds.), Building object categories in developmental time. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Gershkoff-Stowe, L. & Smith, L. B. (2004). Shape and the first hundred nouns. Child Development, 75(4), 1-17.
Gershkoff-Stowe, L. & Thelen, E. (2004). U-shaped changes in behavior: A dynamic systems perspective. Journal of Cognition and Development, 1(5), 11-36.
Gershkoff-Stowe, L. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2002). Is there a natural order for expressing semantic relations? Cognitive Psychology, 45(3), 375-412.
Gershkoff-Stowe, L. (2002). Object naming, vocabulary growth, and the development of word retrieval abilities. Journal of Memory and Language, 46, 665-687.
Smith, L.B., Jones, S.S., Landau, B., Gershkoff-Stowe, L. & Samuelson, L. (2002). Object name learning provides on-the-job training for attention. Psychological Science, 13(1), 13-19.
Gershkoff-Stowe, L. (2001). The course of children’s naming errors in early word learning. Journal of Cognition and Development, 2, 131-155.
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