Language
Nov 18, 2019
My research in language centres on questions of representation, evolution, and acquisition. What biases explain people’s language learning, and to what extent are they domain general? What drives the difference in language acquisition abilities between adults and children? What structure do our mental linguistic representations have, and why? How is language, or any cultural product, shaped by the organisation of the world, the nature of communication, and the structure of the human mind? How is language and language learning shaped by the fact that it is a fundamentally social construct shared by social agents?
Current projects focus mostly on the dynamics of information transmission, social assumptions in language learning, statistical learning, the distributional structure of language, and semantic network structure. Previous work (to which I may return) centres on phoneme learning, grammatical representation and learning, and regularisation.
Andrew Perfors
Professor
I seek to understand how people reason and think, both on their own and in groups.
Publications
Simon De Deyne, Sophie Warner, Andrew Perfors
(2023).
Common words, uncommon meanings: Evidence for widespread gender differences in word meaning.
In M Goldwater and F Anggoro and B Hayes and D Ong (Eds.) Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: Manuscript under review.
Viola Pucci, Yoshihisa Kashima, Andrew Perfors
(2023).
Online communication to the ingroup and the outgroup: The role of identity in the "what" and "why" of information sharing.
In M Goldwater and F Anggoro and B Hayes and D Ong (Eds.) Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: Manuscript under review.
Andrew Wang, Simon De Deyne, Meredith McKague, Andrew Perfors
(2023).
Word prediction in context: An empirical investigation of core vocabulary.
In M Goldwater and F Anggoro and B Hayes and D Ong (Eds.) Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: Manuscript under review.
Amy Mickelberg, Bradley Walker, Ullrich Ecker, Piers Howe, Andrew Perfors, Nicolas Fay
(2022).
Impression formation stimuli: A corpus of behavior statements rated on morality, competence, informativeness, and believability.
PLoS ONE 17(6): e0269393.
Andrew Wang, Simon De Deyne, Meredith McKague, Andrew Perfors
(2022).
Core words in semantic representation.
In J Culbertson and A Perfors and H Rabagliati and V Ramenzoni (Eds.) Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 962-968.
John Mansfield, Carmen Saldana, Peter Hurst, Rachel Nordlinger, Sabine Stoll, Balthasar Bickel, Andrew Perfors
(2022).
Category clustering and morphological learning.
Cognitive Science 46(2): e13107.
Andrew Perfors, Evan Kidd
(2022).
The role of stimulus-specific perceptual fluency in statistical learning.
Cognitive Science 46(2): e13100.
Jessica Sullivan, Michelle Mei, Andrew Perfors, Erica Wojcik, Michael Frank
(2021).
A large, longitudinal audiovisual dataset recorded from the infant’s perspective.
Open Mind 5: 20-29.
Simon De Deyne, Danielle Navarro, Guillem Collell, Andrew Perfors
(2021).
Visual and affective multimodal models of word meaning in language and mind.
Cognitive Science 45(1): e12922.
Keith Ransom, Wouter Voorspoels, Danielle Navarro, Andrew Perfors
(2019).
Where the truth lies: How sampling implications drive deception without lying.
Manuscript.
Andrew Hendrickson, Andrew Perfors
(2019).
Cross-situational learning in a Zipfian environment.
Cognition 189: 11-22.
Simon De Deyne, Danielle Navarro, Andrew Perfors, Marc Brysbaert, Gert Storms
(2019).
The "Small World of Words" English word association norms for over 12,000 cue words.
Behaviour Research Methods 51: 987-1006 [Best paper of the year].
Samarth Mehrotra, Andrew Perfors
(2019).
Generic noun phrases in child speech.
In A Goel, C Seifert, and C Freksa (Eds.) Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 803-808.
Yung Khoe, Andrew Hendrickson, Andrew Perfors
(2019).
Modeling individual performance in cross-situational word learning.
In A Goel, C Seifert, and C Freksa (Eds.) Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 560-566.
Danielle Navarro, Andrew Perfors, Arthur Kary, Scott Brown, Chris Donkin
(2018).
When extremists win: Cultural transmission via iterated learning when populations are heterogeneous.
Cognitive Science 42: 2108-2149.
Steven Langsford, Andrew Perfors, Andrew Hendrickson, Lauren Kennedy, Danielle Navarro
(2018).
Quantifying sentence acceptability measures: Reliability, bias, and variability.
Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 3(1): 37.
Simon De Deyne, Andrew Perfors, Danielle Navarro
(2018).
Learning word meaning with little means: An investigation into the inferential capacity of paradigmatic information.
In C Kalish, M Rau, J Zhu and T Rogers (Eds.) Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 1608-1613.
Keith Ransom, Andrew Hendrickson, Andrew Perfors, Danielle Navarro
(2018).
Representational and sampling assumptions drive individual differences in single category generalisation.
In C Kalish, M Rau, J Zhu and T Rogers (Eds.) Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 930-935.
Kenny Smith, Andrew Perfors, Olga Feher, Anna Samara, Kate Swoboda, Elizabeth Wonnacott
(2017).
Language learning, language use, and the evolution of linguistic variation.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 372.
Simon De Deyne, Andrew Perfors, Danielle Navarro
(2017).
Predicting human similarity judgments with distributional models: The value of word associations.
Proceedings of the 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Melbourne, Australia, 4806-4810.
Andrew Perfors
(2017).
On simplicity and emergence.
Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 24: 175-176.
Danielle Navarro, Andrew Perfors, Arthur Kary, Scott Brown, Chris Donkin
(2017).
When extremists win: On the behavior of iterated learning chains when priors are heterogeneous.
In G Gunzelmann, A Howes, T Tenbrink, and E Davelaar (Eds.) Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 847-852.
Andrew Perfors
(2016).
Adult regularization of inconsistent input depends on pragmatic factors.
Language Learning and Development 12: 138-155. [Peter Jusczyk Best Paper Award].
Simon De Deyne, Andrew Perfors, Danielle Navarro
(2016).
Predicting human similarity judgments with distributional models: The value of word associations.
26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Osaka, Japan: 1861-1870. [Best Paper Award].
Nick Chater, Alexander Clark, John Goldstone, Andrew Perfors
(2015).
Empiricism and language learnability.
Oxford University Press.
Simon De Deyne, Steven Verheyen, Andrew Perfors, Danielle Navarro
(2015).
Evidence for widespread thematic structure in the mental lexicon.
In DC Noelle, R Dale, AS Warlaumont, J Yoshimi, T Matlock, CD Jennings and PP Maglio (Eds.) Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 518-523.
Andrew Perfors
(2014).
Bayesian inference in word learning.
In PJ Brooks and V Kempe (Eds.) Encyclopedia of Language Development: 46-49.
Andrew Perfors
(2014).
Induction in language learning.
In PJ Brooks and V Kempe (Eds.) Encyclopedia of Language Development: 281-283.
Andrew Perfors, Danielle Navarro
(2014).
Language evolution can be shaped by the structure of the world.
Cognitive Science 38(4): 775-793.
Andrew Perfors, Keith Ransom, Danielle Navarro
(2014).
People ignore token frequency when deciding how widely to generalize.
In P Bellow, M Guarani, M McShane and B Scassellati (Eds.) Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 2759-2764.
Andrew Perfors
(2012).
When do memory limitations lead to regularization? An experimental and computational investigation.
Journal of Memory and Language 67: 486-506.
Andrew Perfors, Jia Ong
(2012).
Musicians are better at learning non-native sound contrasts even in non-tonal languages.
In N Miyake, D Peebles and RP Cooper (Eds.) Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 839-844.
Andrew Perfors
(2012).
Probability matching vs over-regularization in language: Participant behavior depends on their interpretation of the task.
In N Miyake, D Peebles and RP Cooper (Eds.) Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 845-850.
Andrew Perfors, Josh Tenenbaum, Terry Regier
(2011).
The learnability of abstract syntactic principles.
Cognition 118: 306-338.
Andrew Perfors
(2011).
Simplicity and fit in grammatical theory.
In E Bender and J Arnold (Eds.) Language from a cognitive perspective: 99-120.
Andrew Perfors, Elizabeth Wonnacott
(2011).
Bayesian modeling of sources of constraint in language acquisition.
In I Arnon and E Clark (Eds.) Experience, Variation, and Generalization: Learning a first language: 277-294.
Andrew Perfors, Danielle Navarro
(2011).
Language evolution is shaped by the structure of the world: An iterated learning analysis.
In L Carlson (Ed.) Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 477-482.
Silvia Yuan, Andrew Perfors, Josh Tenenbaum, Fei Xu
(2011).
Learning individual words and learning about words simultaneously.
In L Carlson (Ed.) Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 3280-3285.
Andrew Perfors
(2011).
Memory limitations alone do not lead to over-regularization: An experimental and computational investigation.
In L Carlson (Ed.) Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 3274-3279.
Andrew Perfors, Josh Tenenbaum, Elizabeth Wonnacott
(2010).
Variability, negative evidence, and the acquisition of verb argument constructions.
Journal of Child Language 37: 607-642.
Andrew Perfors, Josh Tenenbaum, Edward Gibson, Terry Regier
(2010).
How recursive is language? A Bayesian exploration.
In H Hulst (Ed.) Recursion and human language: 159-175.
Luke Maurits, Andrew Perfors, Danielle Navarro
(2010).
Why are some word orders more common than others? A uniform information density account.
In J Lafferty, CKI Williams, J Shawe-Taylor, RS Zemel and A Culotta (Eds.) Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems: 1585-1593.
Andrew Perfors, Nicholas Burns
(2010).
Adult language learners under cognitive load do not over-regularize like children.
In S Ohlsson and R Catrambone (Eds.) Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 2524-2529.
Andrew Perfors, Danielle Navarro
(2010).
How does the presence of a label affect attention to other features?.
In S Ohlsson and R Catrambone (Eds.) Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 1834-1839.
Andrew Perfors, David Dunbar
(2010).
Phonetic training makes word learning easier.
In S Ohlsson and R Catrambone (Eds.) Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 1613-1618.
Rachel Stephens, Andrew Perfors, Danielle Navarro
(2010).
Social context effects on the impact of category labels.
In S Ohlsson and R Catrambone (Eds.) Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 1411-1416.
Luke Maurits, Andrew Perfors, Danielle Navarro
(2009).
Joint acquisition of word order and word reference.
N Taatgen, H Rijn, L Schomaker and J Nerbonne (Eds.) Proceedings of the 31st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: 1728-1733.
Stephanie Foraker, Terry Regier, Naveen Khetarpal, Andrew Perfors, Josh Tenenbaum
(2009).
Indirect evidence and the poverty of the stimulus: The case of anaphoric one.
Developmental Science 10: 307-321.
Andrew Perfors
(2008).
Learnability, representation, and language: A Bayesian approach.
PhD Thesis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Cambridge, MA.
Stephanie Foraker, Terry Regier, Naveen Khetarpal, Andrew Perfors, Josh Tenenbaum
(2007).
Indirect evidence and the poverty of the stimulus: The case of anaphoric one.
In D McNamara and J Trafton (Eds.) Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 275-281.
Anne Fernald, Andrew Perfors, Virginia Marchman
(2006).
Picking up speed in understanding: Speech processing efficiency and vocabulary growth across the 2nd year.
Developmental Psychology 42: 98-116.
Andrew Perfors, Josh Tenenbaum, Terry Regier
(2006).
Poverty of the Stimulus? A rational approach.
In R Sun and N Miyake (Eds.) Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society: 663-668.
Tom Wasow, Andrew Perfors, David Beaver
(2005).
The puzzle of ambiguity.
In O Orgun and P Sells (Eds.) Morphology and The Web of Grammar: Essays in Memory of Steven G. Lapointe: 265-282.
Andrew Perfors
(2002).
Simulated evolution of language: A review of the field.
*Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 5(2).
Andrew Perfors
(2000).
Simulated evolution of communication: The emergence of meaning.
MA Thesis. Stanford University Linguistics Department. Stanford, CA.