Alexander LaTourrette
Biography
I’m a cognitive scientist studying the development of language and cognition, so I’m broadly interested in how we learn how think and how to talk about our thinking. I received my Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology at Northwestern University, working with Sandra Waxman, Lance Rips, and Adriana Weisleder to examine how labeling objects changes the way infants remember and categorize objects. I then completed a NRSA post-doctoral fellowship with John Trueswell and Charles Yang at the University of Pennsylvania, studying mechanisms of word learning in children and adults. Finally, I served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Haverford college, teaching courses like Cognition, Communicating Psychology, and Language & Thought.
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Summary Statement of Research Interests
I study language, cognition, and their interaction across the lifespan: from infants as young as 6 months to preschool- and elementary-age children to adults. My research has investigated how labeling objects influences the way infants categorize and remember them, and how infants learn to map labels not just to referents but to particular word meanings. My research also examines what information infants, children and adults use to learn, and remember, word meanings. Across all of my work, I am interested in variability in language development, asking how language abilities vary across different learners (e.g., multilingual children, children who are late talkers) and different contexts (e.g., hearing speech that is less clear or that occurs in an unfamiliar accent).