Hugh Rabagliati


NYU Psychology	Programs	Courses	Faculty	People	Events	Contacts	[Internal]
Hugh Rabagliati

		Research	Biography	Students	Publications	Address

Cognition & Perception
Developmental

Research

My interest in child language has always been mainly for the light it throws on cognition. Child language is not, as many suppose, a speciality in cognition. It embraces all of cognition, but from the standpoint of the developing mind. Each of the main problems in the philosophy of science has its reflex in the study of child language.
--John MacNamara, A Border Dispute

Hello! I am a 4th-year graduate student in NYU's psychology department, interested in how we both acquire and process language. I have two main research strands ongoing.

1. How does our conceptual system interact with our lexical semantic system? And how does conceptual development interact with lexical semantic development? I am very interested in the ways that context is, and is not, able to modify a word's meaning. For example, in English it is perfectly legitimate to describe a DVD as shiny, and to describe it as two hours long. A movie could also be described as two hours long, but to describe it as shiny would only lead to puzzled looks. Why is it that DVD has a sense akin to movie, but movie does not have a sense akin to DVD? Is this fact completely arbitrary, or are there principles that can explain it? If so, how do children learn those principles? This line of work is supervised by Gary Marcus and Liina Pylkkänen.

2. When we predict a word, what sort of expectations do we make? Some recent work with Suzanne Dikker has shown that, under certain circumstances, encountering an unexpected word in context modulates the visual M100 MEG component, the first major response to visual stimulation. This result suggests that predictions carry detailed estimates of the upcoming visual form of a word. We're interested in what sort of estimates these are, and how this affects sentence processing. This line of work is supervised by Liina Pylkkänen.

Although its currently on the backburner, I'm still very interested in the learning mechanisms infants have available to learn about language and the world around them. I've worked on this question with Gary Marcus and Scott Johnson. Occasionally I still think a wee bit about numbers. The photos above show my multiple bridge tracking system operating in (delightful) Ljubljana. As can be seen, I am only able to track three bridges at a time.

For pre-, -re-, and --e-prints, see below.

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Biography

I emerged from the University of Oxford's BabyLab in 2004, and arrived at NYU a year later. In between I worked with children with learning disabilities, pondered the nature of number representations in language impaired children with Heather van der Lely, and under the threat of imminent barbarism drank as much tea as a civilised man should. Here is a CV.

Education

BA, University of Oxford, 2004

Research Experience

Research Assistant, Centre for Developmental Language Disorders & Cognitive Neuroscience, 2005
Research Student, Oxford Babylab, 2004

Research Interests

Language Acquisition
Cognitive Development
Neurolinguistics
Sentence Processing

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Students

Current undergraduate researchers:
Hanna Gelfand
Emily Norman

I'm always looking for smart undergraduates who want to do research on language acquisition. If you are that smart undergraduate, have a background in linguistics/psychology (or want to get one) and are happy working with children, send me an email. Undergrads in the lab typically work 10 hours a week during the semester, helping to test and schedule both children and adults, transcribe and code data, prepare stimuli, and do lots of other fun research things.

Alumni:
Tracie Lin (NYU Medical School)
Becca Maller
Caroline Lyons

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Publications

* Indicates joint first authorship

Dikker*, S., Rabagliati*, H., & Pylkkänen, L. (2009). Sensitivity to Syntax in Visual Cortex. Cognition, 110(3),293-321

Johnson, S. P., Fernandes, K. J., Frank, M. C., Kirkham, N. Z., Marcus, G. F., Rabagliati, H., & Slemmer, J. A. (2009). Abstract Rule Learning for Visual Sequences in 8- and 11-Month-Olds Infancy,14(1),2-18

Marcus, G.F., & Rabagliati, H. (2008). Language acquisition, domain specificity and descent with modification. In Colombo, J., McCardle, P., & Freund, L., (Eds.), Infant Pathways to Language:, Methods, Models and Research Directions Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum

Marcus, G.F. & Rabagliati, H. (2006). What developmental disorders can tell us about the nature and origins of language. Nature Neuroscience,9(10):1226-9

Marcus, G.F. & Rabagliati, H. (2006). Genes and domain specificity, Trends in Cognitive Science,10(9):397-8. See Kovas and Plomin's original article & response (TICS subscription required)

Presentations & Posters

If you want reprints of posters or copies of talk slides, please email me.

* Indicates joint first authorship

Rabagliati, H., Lin, T., Gelfand, H., Marcus, G.F., & Pylkkänen, L. Development at the syntax-semantics interface: when do children understand implicit ontological shifts? Talk presented at the 14th Annual Conference on Architectures & Mechanisms for Language Processing, Cambridge, UK, September 4-6, 2008.

Dikker, S., Rabagliati, H., Farmer, T.A., & Pylkkänen, L. Sensitivity to syntax in visual cortex: the role of phonological typicality Poster presented at the 14th Annual Conference on Architectures & Mechanisms for Language Processing, Cambridge, UK, September 4-6, 2008.

Rabagliati, H., & Marcus, G.F. (2008) Interactions between statistical and rule learning in adults and infants. Talk presented at the 16th International Conference on Infant Studies, Vancouver, Canada, March 27-29, 2008.

Rabagliati*, H., Dikker*, S., & Pylkkänen, L. (2008) Sensitivity to syntax in visual cortex: A manipulation of prediction strength and morphological type. Poster presented at the 21st Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Chapel Hill, NC, March 13-15, 2008.

Dikker*, S., Rabagliati*, H., & Pylkkänen, L. (2007) Sensitivity to syntax in visual cortex: An MEG Study. Talk presented at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society 2007 Annual Meeting, New York, NY, May 05-08. (Selected for Graduate Student Presents Award)

Rabagliati*, H., Dikker*, S., & Pylkkänen, L. (2007) MEG reveals sensitivity to phrase-structure violations in visual cortex. Talk presented at the 20th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, San Diego, CA, March 29-31.

Rabagliati, H., Fernandes, K. J., Senghas, A., Johnson, S. P., & Marcus, G. F., (2006) Rule-learning: Advantage Language, or Advantage Speech? Poster presented at 31st Boston University Conference on Language Development, November 3-5, 2006