Anna Papafragou
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 1094086 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Anna Papafragou |
| NOMBRES | Anna |
| APELLIDO | Papafragou |
| FIRMA | PAPAFRAGOU A |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Pennsylvania |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5435-1058 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 41 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 203 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 40 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1996 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Distributional signatures of superordinate nouns
Taxonomies of object categories (and their noun labels) often include the subordinate (e.g., dalmatian), the basic (e.g., dog), and the superordinate (e.g., animal) levels of specificity. Of these, superordinate nouns are notoriously difficult to learn for young children. We hypothesize that the choice of a superordinate label encodes a particular pragmatic level of informativeness, which, in turn, leads to distributional patterns that can help t…
Representation of event boundedness in English and Mandarin speakers
Dwell Times Reveal Effects of Abstract Event Type on Attention Allocation
The human mind can segment continuous streams of activity in the world into meaningful, discrete units known as events. However, not all events are created equal. We draw a distinction between bounded events (e.g., folding a handkerchief) that have a predictable structure that develops in distinct stages (i.e., a beginning, middle, and end) and a well‐defined endpoint, and unbounded events (e.g., waving a handkerchief) that lack such a well‐defin…
The strength of conservativity
One of the best-known semantic universals is determiner conservativity, roughly, the idea that the truth of sentences like most fish swim depends only on the things named by the determiner’s first argument (fish). Conservativity has been argued to reflect a fundamental property of grammatical architecture, a conclusion bolstered by evidence that adults (and children) can pair novel determiners with conservative meanings but not with minimally-dif…
The Ins and Outs of spatial language
Research on the language of space has uncovered a complex set of conceptual and linguistic factors affecting the nature, use and acquisition of spatial vocabularies across languages. Here we highlight the important but understudied role of pragmatic factors in how spatial relations are encoded across ages and languages. We focus on Containment ( in/out ) and Support ( on/off ) terms that can denote both static locations (‘places’: be in/out of X …
Sources and goals in memory and language
Asymmetries in encoding event roles
Event representation at the scale of ordinary experience
Boundedness supports children’s event representations
Natural languages distinguish between telic predicates that denote events leading to an inherent endpoint (e.g., draw a balloon ) and atelic predicates that denote events with no inherent endpoint (e.g., draw balloons ). Telicity distinctions in many languages are already partly available to 4-5-year-olds. Here, using exclusively nonlinguistic tasks and a sample of English-speaking children, we ask whether young learners use corresponding tempora…
The acquisition of subordinate nouns as pragmatic inference
Pragmatic effects on semantic learnability
Children and adults use pragmatic principles to interpret non-linguistic symbols
Events and objects are similar cognitive entities
Keeping quantifier meaning in mind
The Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon
The present handbook is a state-of-the-art compilation of papers from leading scholars on the mental lexicon—the representation of language in the mind/brain at the level of individual words and meaningful sub-word units. In recent years, the study of words as mental objects has grown rapidly across several fields including linguistics, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, education, and computational cognitive science. This comprehensive collec…
Encoding transfer of possession events
The present study focuses on the linguistic and non-linguistic encoding of giving and taking events. For both English and Mandarin Chinese speakers, we find that the linguistic encoding of these transfer events respects the Thematic Hierarchy and the Source-Goal asymmetry (Exp.1 and 2): Agents are mentioned more often than Patient; Goals are encoded more often than Sources. However, in non-linguistic representation, the bias against Sources is no…
Agents’ goals affect construal of event endpoints
Boundedness in event cognition
Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon
How children attend to events before speaking
How do children talk about the dynamic world around them? In this eyetracking study, we demonstrate language-specific patterns in the way 3- and 4-year-old speakers of English and Greek inspect motion events prior to speaking and describe such events in their native language. Across age and language groups, children were more likely to mention manners of motion than paths, but English-speaking children were more likely to provide manner informati…
Understanding Other Minds
Human beings spend vast amounts of time thinking about what other people believe, want, hope, and fear. Understanding other minds is part of our social nature and forms the basis of the social fabr
Cross-linguistic frequency and the learnability of semantics
Cognitive and pragmatic factors in language production
Pragmatics and social meaning
Spatial Terms
Across the world’s languages, spatial terms are organized around a set of basic, non-linguistic spatial notions. Nevertheless, there is also considerable cross-linguistic variation in terms of both the kinds of linguistic devices used to express spatial relations and the way these devices carve up the semantic domain of space. This chapter reviews literature on spatial terms cross-linguistically, focusing on three main sub-divisions of the spatia…
Thoughts and Utterances
Epistemic modality and truth conditions
On metonymy
Inference and word meaning
On speech-act modality
Interactions Between Language and Mental Representations
It has long been recognized that language interacts with visual and spatial processes. However, the nature and extent of these interactions are widely debated. The goal of this article is to review empirical findings across several domains to understand whether language affects the way speakers conceptualize the world even when they are not speaking or understanding speech. A second goal of the present review is to shed light on the mechanisms th…
Pragmatics and spatial language
Across languages, children produce locative back earlier and more frequently than front , but the reasons for this asymmetry are unclear. On a semantic misanalysis explanation, early meanings for front and back are nonadult (nongeometric), and rely on notions of visibility and occlusion respectively. On an alternative, pragmatic inference explanation, visibility and occlusion are simply pragmatic aspects of the meaning of front and back ; the pro…
Interactive contexts increase informativeness in children’s referential communication
Adults adjust the informativeness of their utterances to the needs of their addressee. For children, however, relevant evidence is mixed. In this article we explore the communicative circumstances under which children offer informative descriptions. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-old children and adults described a target event from a pair of almost identical events to a passive confederate listener who could either see or not see the referents. …
On metonymy
Inference and word meaning
On speech-act modality
Shake, rattle, ‘n’ roll
Thoughts and Utterances
Hard Words
How do children acquire the meaning of words? And why are words such as know harder for learners to acquire than words such as dog or jump? We suggest that the chief limiting factor in acquiring the vocabulary of natural languages consists not in overcoming conceptual difficulties with abstract word meanings but rather in mapping these meanings onto their corresponding lexical forms. This opening premise of our position, while controversial, is s…
From scalar semantics to implicature
One of the tasks of language learning is the discovery of the intricate division of labour between the lexical-semantic content of an expression and the pragmatic inferences the expression can be used to convey. Here we investigate experimentally the development of the semantics–pragmatics interface, focusing on Greek-speaking five-year-olds' interpretation of aspectual expressions such as arxizo (‘start’) and degree modifiers such as miso (‘half…
Epistemic modality and truth conditions
Does language guide event perception? Evidence from eye movements
Lexical, syntactic, and semantic-geometric factors in the acquisition of motion predicates
We report a study that explored the mechanisms used in hypothesizing meanings for novel motion predicates (verbs and prepositions) cross-linguistically. Motion stimuli were presented to English- and Greek-speaking adults and preschoolers accompanied by (a) a novel intransitive verb, (b) a novel transitive verb, (c) a novel transitive preposition, or (d) no novel predicate. Our study provides evidence that both language-specific (lexical) and univ…
Children’s derivation of scalar implicatures
Interactions Between Language and Mental Representations
It has long been recognized that language interacts with visual and spatial processes. However, the nature and extent of these interactions are widely debated. The goal of this article is to review empirical findings across several domains to understand whether language affects the way speakers conceptualize the world even when they are not speaking or understanding speech. A second goal of the present review is to shed light on the mechanisms th…
Learning words from speakers with false beliefs
During communication, hearers try to infer the speaker's intentions to be able to understand what the speaker means. Nevertheless, whether (and how early) preschoolers track their interlocutors' mental states is still a matter of debate. Furthermore, there is disagreement about how children's ability to consult a speaker's belief in communicative contexts relates to their ability to track someone's belief in non-communicative contexts. Here, we s…
Evidentials, Information Sources, and Cognition
This chapter investigates how conceptual representations of sources of knowledge make contact with linguistic evidentiality. By drawing on empirical evidence from both adult and child speakers of languages with different evidential systems, the present chapter aims to understand which aspects of cognition are shared by speakers of different languages and which aspects may be susceptible to linguistic influences. Findings from these lines of work …
Spatial Terms
Across the world’s languages, spatial terms are organized around a set of basic, non-linguistic spatial notions. Nevertheless, there is also considerable cross-linguistic variation in terms of both the kinds of linguistic devices used to express spatial relations and the way these devices carve up the semantic domain of space. This chapter reviews literature on spatial terms cross-linguistically, focusing on three main sub-divisions of the spatia…
Pragmatics and spatial language
Across languages, children produce locative back earlier and more frequently than front , but the reasons for this asymmetry are unclear. On a semantic misanalysis explanation, early meanings for front and back are nonadult (nongeometric), and rely on notions of visibility and occlusion respectively. On an alternative, pragmatic inference explanation, visibility and occlusion are simply pragmatic aspects of the meaning of front and back ; the pro…
Interactive contexts increase informativeness in children’s referential communication
Adults adjust the informativeness of their utterances to the needs of their addressee. For children, however, relevant evidence is mixed. In this article we explore the communicative circumstances under which children offer informative descriptions. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-old children and adults described a target event from a pair of almost identical events to a passive confederate listener who could either see or not see the referents. …
Cross-linguistic frequency and the learnability of semantics
Cognitive and pragmatic factors in language production
Pragmatics and social meaning
Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon
How children attend to events before speaking
How do children talk about the dynamic world around them? In this eyetracking study, we demonstrate language-specific patterns in the way 3- and 4-year-old speakers of English and Greek inspect motion events prior to speaking and describe such events in their native language. Across age and language groups, children were more likely to mention manners of motion than paths, but English-speaking children were more likely to provide manner informati…
Understanding Other Minds
Human beings spend vast amounts of time thinking about what other people believe, want, hope, and fear. Understanding other minds is part of our social nature and forms the basis of the social fabr
The Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon
The present handbook is a state-of-the-art compilation of papers from leading scholars on the mental lexicon—the representation of language in the mind/brain at the level of individual words and meaningful sub-word units. In recent years, the study of words as mental objects has grown rapidly across several fields including linguistics, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, education, and computational cognitive science. This comprehensive collec…
Encoding transfer of possession events
The present study focuses on the linguistic and non-linguistic encoding of giving and taking events. For both English and Mandarin Chinese speakers, we find that the linguistic encoding of these transfer events respects the Thematic Hierarchy and the Source-Goal asymmetry (Exp.1 and 2): Agents are mentioned more often than Patient; Goals are encoded more often than Sources. However, in non-linguistic representation, the bias against Sources is no…
Psychology (34 obras) · Linguistics (29 obras) · Computer Science (27 obras) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (22 obras) · Cognitive psychology (21 obras) · Cognition (19 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (17 obras) · Categorization, perception, and language (17 obras) · Philosophy (11 obras) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (10 obras)