Lisa Gershkoff-Stowe: Cognitive Science Program: Indiana University Bloomington

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Lisa Gershkoff-Stowe

Lisa Gershkoff-Stowe

Adjunct Associate Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences

Associate Professor, Speech and Hearing Sciences

Departmental Liason to Cognitive Science, Speech and Hearing Sciences

gershkof@indiana.edu
(812) 856-0667
Office Hours

M-F

By Appointment Only

Education

Ph.D., Developmental Psychology, Indiana University, 1996

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.

Professional Experience

Post-doctoral Fellow, University of Chicago 1996-98

Representative publications

Tracking Multiple Statistics: Simultaneous Learning of Object Names and Categories in English and Mandarin Speakers (2016)
Chi‐hsin Chen, Lisa Gershkoff‐Stowe, Chih‐Yi Wu, Hintat Cheung, Chen Yu
Cognitive Science A Multidisciplinary Journal , 41 (6),

Abstract: Two experiments were conducted to examine adult learners' ability to extract multiple statistics in simultaneously presented visual and auditory input. Experiment 1 used a cross‐situational learning paradigm to test whether English speakers were able to use co‐occurrences to learn word‐to‐object mappings and concurrently form object categories based on the commonalities across training stimuli. Experiment 2 replicated the first experiment and further examined whether speakers of Mandarin, a language in which final syllables of object names are more predictive of category membership than English, were able to learn words and form object categories when trained with the same type of structures. The results indicate that both groups of learners successfully extracted multiple levels of co‐occurrence and used them to learn words and object categories simultaneously. However, marked individual differences in performance were also found, suggesting possible interference and competition in processing the two concurrent streams of regularities.

Dissertation Committee Service

Author	Dissertation Title	Committee
Gokcesu, Bahriye S.	Metaphor Processing and Polysemy (December 2007)	Goldstone, R. (Co-Chair), Gasser, M. (Co-Chair), Gershkoff-Stowe L., Jones, M.
Hanania, Rima	Selective Attention and Attention Shifting in Preschool Children (August 2009)	Smith, L. (Co-Chair), Gershkoff-Stowe, L. (Co-Chair), Goldstone, R., Jones, S.
Shayan, Shakila	Emergence of Roles in English Canonical Transitive Construction (June 2008)	Gasser, M. (Co-Chair), Gershkoff-Stowe, L. (Co-Chair), Leake, D., Goldstone, R., Smith, L.

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