John C Trueswell

Biographic Data

ID	2397187
NAME	John C Trueswell
GIVEN NAMES	John C
FAMILY NAME	Trueswell
SIGNATURE	TRUESWELL J C
AFFILIATIONS	University of Pennsylvania
ORCID	0009-0008-5613-6341
VERIFIED	Yes
TOTAL WORKS	37
TOTAL CITATIONS	14
AUTHOR COUNT	36
EDITOR COUNT	1
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR	1994
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR	2026
H-INDEX	2

Failure is always an option: Children's production of truth-functional negation and its implications for learning
Open AccessVictor Gomes, Yubin Huh et al.ARTICLECognition2026
Truth-functional negation presents a host of obstacles to a new language learner, ranging from abstractness (e.g., how can one point to it) to salience (e.g., it refers to things that are not occurring). It is therefore unclear how young learners learn truth-functional negation given the limitations in their knowledge about the world and still developing cognitive abilities. We explore the possibility that there are particular “ gem ” moments for…
Close enough isn’t good enough in word learning: Successful cross-situational word mappings are semantically independent of previous mappings
Open AccessAlexander S LaTourrette, Charles Yang et al.ARTICLEJournal of Memory and Language2026
The strength of conservativity: Evidence from learnability experiments
Open AccessTimothy Knowlton, John C Trueswell et al.ARTICLEProceedings of the Linguistic…2025
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…
Cognitive Control Skills Are Related to Ambiguity Awareness in French‐Learning 5‐to‐6‐Year‐Olds: Implications for Reading Development
Open AccessViolette Bigot, John C Trueswell et al.ARTICLECognitive Science2025References: 140
Five‐to‐six‐year‐olds’ abilities to detect and solve ambiguities in spoken language have been found to be a predictor of their later reading abilities in first‐to‐third grade. However, the origins of this relationship remain unclear. Success in ambiguity detection may be reflective of overall language attainment, which varies with socioeconomic status (SES) and is known to predict reading. Yet, it is also possible that children's ability to detec…
Sources and goals in memory and language: Fragility and robustness in event representation
Open AccessYiran Chen, John C Trueswell et al.ARTICLEJournal of Memory and Language2024
Asymmetries in encoding event roles: Evidence from language and cognition
Open AccessErcenur Ünal, Frances Wilson et al.ARTICLECognition2024
Language acquisition and language processing: Finding new connections
John C TrueswellARTICLELanguage Acquisition2023
English-learning preschoolers can correctly parse and interpret negative sentences to guide their interpretations of novel noun and verb meanings
Antônio De Carvalho, Victor Gomes et al.ARTICLELanguage Acquisition2023
We studied English-learning children’s ability to learn the meanings of novel words from sentences containing truth-functional negation (Exp1) and to use the semantics of negation to inform word meaning (Exp2). In Exp1, 22-month-olds (n = 21) heard dialogues introducing a novel verb in either negative-transitive (“Mary didn’t blick the baby”) or negative-intransitive (“Mary didn’t blick”) sentences. When then asked to “Find blicking!” while viewi…
Keeping quantifier meaning in mind: Connecting semantics, cognition, and pragmatics
Open AccessTimothy Knowlton, John C Trueswell et al.ARTICLECognitive Psychology2023
It's not just what we don't know: The mapping problem in the acquisition of negation
Open AccessVictor Gomes, Rebecca Doherty et al.ARTICLECognitive Psychology2023
The Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon
Anna Papafragou, John C Trueswell et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of the Mental…2022
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
Open AccessYiran Chen, Anna Papafragou et al.ARTICLEProceedings of the Linguistic…2022
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…
Being suspicious of suspicious coincidences: The case of learning subordinate word meanings
Open AccessFei-Hsien Wang, Felix Hao Wang et al.ARTICLECognition2022
Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon
Anna Papafragou, John C Trueswell et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of the Mental…2021
How children attend to events before speaking: Crosslinguistic evidence from the motion domain
Open AccessAnn Bunger, Dimitrios Skordos et al.ARTICLEGlossa a journal of general…2021
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…
“ Look! It is not a bamoule! ”: 18‐ And 24‐month‐olds Can Use Negative Sentences to Constrain Their Interpretation of Novel Word Meanings
Open AccessAntônio De Carvalho, Cécile Crimon et al.ARTICLEDevelopmental Science2021
Two word-learning experiments were conducted to investigate the understanding of negative sentences in 18- and 24-month-old children. In Experiment 1, after learning that bamoule means "penguin" and pirdaling means "cartwheeling," 18-month-olds (n = 48) increased their looking times when listening to negative sentences rendered false by their visual context ("Look! It is not a bamoule!" while watching a video showing a penguin cartwheeling); howe…
Top-down grouping affects adjacent dependency learning
Open AccessFei-Hsien Wang, Jason D Zevin et al.ARTICLEPsychonomic Bulletin & Review2020
Cognitive and pragmatic factors in language production: Evidence from source-goal motion events
Open AccessMonica L Do, L Monica et al.ARTICLECognition2020
Familiar words can serve as a semantic seed for syntactic bootstrapping
Open AccessMireille Babineau, Antônio De Carvalho et al.ARTICLEDevelopmental Science2020
Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. But how do they learn which contexts are linked to which semantic features in the first place? We investigate if 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 60) can learn about a syntactic context from tracking its use with only a few familiar words. After watching a 5-min training video in which a novel function word (i.e., 'ko') replaced either personal pro…
Studying the Real-Time Interpretation of Novel Noun and Verb Meanings in Young Children
Open AccessAntônio De Carvalho, Alex De Carvalho et al.ARTICLEFrontiers in Psychology2019
Decades of research show that children rely on the linguistic context in which novel words occur to infer their meanings. However, because learning in these studies was assessed after children had heard numerous occurrences of a novel word in informative linguistic contexts, it is impossible to determine how much exposure would be needed for a child to learn from such information. This study investigated the speed with which French 20-month-olds …
Syntactic processing and acquisition
Lucia Pozzan, John C TrueswellARTICLELinguistic Approaches to…2015
Preview this article: Syntactic processing and acquisition, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/lab.5.4.13poz-1.gif
Quality of early parent input predicts child vocabulary 3 years later
Open AccessErica A Cartmill, Benjamin F Armstrong et al.ARTICLEProceedings of the National…2013
Children vary greatly in the number of words they know when they enter school, a major factor influencing subsequent school and workplace success. This variability is partially explained by the differential quantity of parental speech to preschoolers. However, the contexts in which young learners hear new words are also likely to vary in referential transparency; that is, in how clearly word meaning can be inferred from the immediate extralinguis…
Interactive processing of contrastive expressions by Russian children
Open AccessI A Sekerina, John C TrueswellARTICLEFirst Language2012
Children’s ability to interpret color adjective noun phrases (e.g., red butterfly) as contrastive was examined in an eyetracking study with 6-year-old Russian children. Pitch accent placement (on the adjective red, or on the noun butterfly) was compared within a visual context containing two red referents (a butterfly and a fox) when only one of them had a contrast member (a purple butterfly) or when both had a contrast member (a purple butterfly…
Broca's Area and Language Processing: Evidence for the Cognitive Control Connection
Open AccessJared M Novick, John C Trueswell et al.ARTICLELanguage and Linguistics Compass2010Cited by: 5References: 88
A long-standing pursuit in cognitive neuropsychology has been to understand the role of Broca's area in language processing. Although a prevailing view has been to equate this region with grammatical abilities in both production and comprehension, a host of recent evidence from brain imaging and patient research has revealed a rather general role for this patch of cortex in complex cognition, even when grammatical performance is untapped-namely, …
Interpreting pronouns and demonstratives in Finnish: Evidence for a form-specific approach to reference resolution
Elke Kaiser, Elsi Kaiser et al.ARTICLELanguage and Cognitive Processes2008
Two Finnish language comprehension experiments are presented which suggest that the referential properties of pronouns and demonstratives cannot be reduced straightforwardly to the salience level of the antecedent. The findings, from a sentence completion study and visual world eye-tracking study, reveal an asymmetry in which features of the antecedent Finnish pronouns and demonstratives are most sensitive to, both in terms of their final interpr…

Semantic Influences On Parsing: Use of Thematic Role Information in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution
Open AccessJohn C Trueswell, Michael K Tanenhaus et al.ARTICLEJournal of Memory and Language1994
Ferreira and Clifton (1986, Experiment 1) found that readers experienced equal difficulty with temporarily ambiguous reduced relatives clauses when the first noun was animate (e.g., "The defendant examined by the lawyer was . . .") and when it was inanimate and thus an unlikely Agent (e.g., "The evidence examined . . ."). This data pattern suggested that a verb′s semantic constraints do not affect initial syntactic ambiguity resolution. We repeat…
The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children
Open AccessJohn C Trueswell, I A Sekerina et al.ARTICLECognition1999
A great deal of psycholinguistic research has focused on the question of how adults interpret language in real time. This work has revealed a complex and interactive language processing system capable of rapidly coordinating linguistic properties of the message with information from the context or situation (e.g. Altmann & Steedman, 1988; Britt, 1994; Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard & Sedivy, 1995; Trueswell & Tanenhaus, 1991). In the study …
One Frog, Two Frog, Red Frog, Blue Frog: Factors Affecting Children's Syntactic Choices in Production and Comprehension
Open AccessFelicia Hurewitz, Sarah Brown-Schmidt et al.ARTICLEJournal of Psycholinguistic…2000Cited by: 8References: 35
Using prosody to avoid ambiguity: Effects of speaker awareness and referential context
Open AccessJesse Snedeker, John C Trueswell et al.ARTICLEJournal of Memory and Language2003
The effects of common ground and perspective on domains of referential interpretation
Open AccessJoy E Hanna, Michael K Tanenhaus et al.ARTICLEJournal of Memory and Language2003
Studying the Grammatical Aspects of Word Recognition: Lexical Priming, Parsing, and Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution
Open AccessJared M Novick, Albert Kim et al.ARTICLEJournal of Psycholinguistic…2003Cited by: 1References: 23
The role of discourse context in the processing of a flexible word-order language
Open AccessE Kaiser, John C Trueswell et al.ARTICLECognition2004
The developing constraints on parsing decisions: The role of lexical-biases and referential scenes in child and adult sentence processing
Open AccessJesse Snedeker, John C TrueswellARTICLECognitive Psychology2004
Hard Words
Lila R Gleitman, Kimberly Wright Cassidy et al.ARTICLELanguage Learning and Development2005
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…
Cognitive control and parsing: Reexamining the role of Broca’s area in sentence comprehension
Open AccessJared M Novick, John C Trueswell et al.ARTICLECognitive, Affective, &…2005
On the give and take between event apprehension and utterance formulation
Open AccessLila R Gleitman, David January et al.ARTICLEJournal of Memory and Language2007
Interpreting pronouns and demonstratives in Finnish: Evidence for a form-specific approach to reference resolution
Elke Kaiser, Elsi Kaiser et al.ARTICLELanguage and Cognitive Processes2008
Two Finnish language comprehension experiments are presented which suggest that the referential properties of pronouns and demonstratives cannot be reduced straightforwardly to the salience level of the antecedent. The findings, from a sentence completion study and visual world eye-tracking study, reveal an asymmetry in which features of the antecedent Finnish pronouns and demonstratives are most sensitive to, both in terms of their final interpr…
Does language guide event perception? Evidence from eye movements
Open AccessAnna Papafragou, Justin C Hulbert et al.ARTICLECognition2008
Broca's Area and Language Processing: Evidence for the Cognitive Control Connection
Open AccessJared M Novick, John C Trueswell et al.ARTICLELanguage and Linguistics Compass2010Cited by: 5References: 88
A long-standing pursuit in cognitive neuropsychology has been to understand the role of Broca's area in language processing. Although a prevailing view has been to equate this region with grammatical abilities in both production and comprehension, a host of recent evidence from brain imaging and patient research has revealed a rather general role for this patch of cortex in complex cognition, even when grammatical performance is untapped-namely, …
Interactive processing of contrastive expressions by Russian children
Open AccessI A Sekerina, John C TrueswellARTICLEFirst Language2012
Children’s ability to interpret color adjective noun phrases (e.g., red butterfly) as contrastive was examined in an eyetracking study with 6-year-old Russian children. Pitch accent placement (on the adjective red, or on the noun butterfly) was compared within a visual context containing two red referents (a butterfly and a fox) when only one of them had a contrast member (a purple butterfly) or when both had a contrast member (a purple butterfly…
Quality of early parent input predicts child vocabulary 3 years later
Open AccessErica A Cartmill, Benjamin F Armstrong et al.ARTICLEProceedings of the National…2013
Children vary greatly in the number of words they know when they enter school, a major factor influencing subsequent school and workplace success. This variability is partially explained by the differential quantity of parental speech to preschoolers. However, the contexts in which young learners hear new words are also likely to vary in referential transparency; that is, in how clearly word meaning can be inferred from the immediate extralinguis…
Syntactic processing and acquisition
Lucia Pozzan, John C TrueswellARTICLELinguistic Approaches to…2015
Preview this article: Syntactic processing and acquisition, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/lab.5.4.13poz-1.gif
Studying the Real-Time Interpretation of Novel Noun and Verb Meanings in Young Children
Open AccessAntônio De Carvalho, Alex De Carvalho et al.ARTICLEFrontiers in Psychology2019
Decades of research show that children rely on the linguistic context in which novel words occur to infer their meanings. However, because learning in these studies was assessed after children had heard numerous occurrences of a novel word in informative linguistic contexts, it is impossible to determine how much exposure would be needed for a child to learn from such information. This study investigated the speed with which French 20-month-olds …
Top-down grouping affects adjacent dependency learning
Open AccessFei-Hsien Wang, Jason D Zevin et al.ARTICLEPsychonomic Bulletin & Review2020
Cognitive and pragmatic factors in language production: Evidence from source-goal motion events
Open AccessMonica L Do, L Monica et al.ARTICLECognition2020
Familiar words can serve as a semantic seed for syntactic bootstrapping
Open AccessMireille Babineau, Antônio De Carvalho et al.ARTICLEDevelopmental Science2020
Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. But how do they learn which contexts are linked to which semantic features in the first place? We investigate if 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 60) can learn about a syntactic context from tracking its use with only a few familiar words. After watching a 5-min training video in which a novel function word (i.e., 'ko') replaced either personal pro…
Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon
Anna Papafragou, John C Trueswell et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of the Mental…2021
How children attend to events before speaking: Crosslinguistic evidence from the motion domain
Open AccessAnn Bunger, Dimitrios Skordos et al.ARTICLEGlossa a journal of general…2021
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…
“ Look! It is not a bamoule! ”: 18‐ And 24‐month‐olds Can Use Negative Sentences to Constrain Their Interpretation of Novel Word Meanings
Open AccessAntônio De Carvalho, Cécile Crimon et al.ARTICLEDevelopmental Science2021
Two word-learning experiments were conducted to investigate the understanding of negative sentences in 18- and 24-month-old children. In Experiment 1, after learning that bamoule means "penguin" and pirdaling means "cartwheeling," 18-month-olds (n = 48) increased their looking times when listening to negative sentences rendered false by their visual context ("Look! It is not a bamoule!" while watching a video showing a penguin cartwheeling); howe…
The Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon
Anna Papafragou, John C Trueswell et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of the Mental…2022
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…