Department of Psychology

Laura Wagner

I study how children acquire language, and in particular, how they learn about meaning. I'm interested in how children's early conceptual abilities map onto the semantics that underlie natural language. Within this general area, I specialize primarily in event semantics and cognition: How do children think about and talk about what's happening? My current research includes studies looking at children's understanding of verb meaning and verb morphology (particularly their understanding of aspectual dimensions of meaning), studies using imitation to evaluate toddlers' non-linguistic event representations, and studies looking at what factors influence how children describe and remember events.

Selected Publications

Wagner, L. (in press) Acquisition of Semantics. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science.

Wagner, L., Swenson, L., & Naigles, L. (2009) Children’s Early Productivity with Verbal Morphology. Cognitive Development (24), 223 - 239.

Wagner, L. (2009) I’ll Never Grow Up: Continuity in Aspectual Representations. Linguistics 47 (5), 1051 - 1074.

Wagner, L. (2009) Manners and Goals in Pre-Linguistic Thought: The Origins of Aspectual Construal. In Chandlee, J., Franchini, M., Lord, S., & Rheiner, G. (eds) Proceedings of the 33rd annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville: Cascadilla Press.

Wagner, L. and Lakusta, L. (2009) Using Language to Navigate the Infant Mind. Perspectives on Psychological Science 4 (2), 177 - 184.

Wagner, L., A. Yocom, M. Greene-Havas (2008) Children’s Understanding of Directed Motion Events in an Imitation Choice Task. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 100, 264 - 275.

Barner, D., Wagner, L., & Snedeker, J. (2008) Events and the ontology of individuals: Verbs as a source of individuating nouns. Cognition 105, 805 - 832.

Lakusta, L., L. Wagner, K. O’Hearn, B. Landau (2007) Conceptual Foundations of Spatial Language: Evidence for a Goal Bias in Infants. Language Learning and Development 3(3), 179 - 197.

Wagner, L. (2006) Aspectual Bootstrapping in Language Acquisition: Telicity and Transitivity. Language Learning and Development 2(1), 51 - 76.

Wagner, L., E. Kako, E. Amick, E. Carrigan, and K. Liu (2005) Children's Use of Pointing to Anchor Reference during Story-telling. In Brugos, A., M. R. Clark-Cotton, and S. Ha (eds) Proceedings of the 29th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville: Cascadilla Press. 639-650.

Wagner, L. and S. Carey (2005) 12-month-olds Represent Probable Endings of Motion Events. Infancy 7 (1), 73 - 83.

Wagner, L. and S. Carey (2003) Individuation of Objects & Events: A Developmental Study. Cognition 90 (2), 163 - 191.

Wagner, L. (2002) Understanding Completion Entailments in the Absence of Agency Cues. Journal of Child Language 29, 109 - 125.

Kako, E. & L. Wagner (2001) The Semantics of Syntactic Structures. Trends in Cognitive Science, Vol 5 no. 3, 102 - 108.

Wagner, L. (2001) Aspectual Influences on Early Tense Interpretation. Journal of Child Language 28, 661 - 681.

Department of Psychology

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Laura Wagner

Selected Publications