LouAnn Gerken
About LouAnn Gerken
I am interested in how infants and young children learn and how general learning mechanisms, such as hypothesis generation and selection, can be used in service of learning language.
Research Interests
Human learning and categorization, language development
Selected Publications
Gerken, L.A. (2009). Language Development. San Diego: Plural Publishing.
Balcomb, F. K., & Gerken, L. A. (2008). Three-year-old children can access their own memory to guide responses on a visual matching task. Developmental Science, 11, 750-760.
Gerken, L. A., & Bollt, A. (2008). Three exemplars allow at least some linguistic generalizations: Implications for generalization mechanisms and constraints. Language Learning and Development, 4(3), 228-248.
Dawson, C., & Gerken, L. A. (2009). Language and music become distinct domains through experience. Cognition, 111(3), 378-382.
Richtsmeier, P. T., Gerken, L. A., Goffman, L., & Hogan, T. (2009). Statistical frequency in perception affects children’s lexical production. Cognition, 111(3), 372-377.
Gerken (2010). Infants use rational decision criteria for choosing among models of their input. Cognition, 115(2), 362-366.
Dawson, C., & Gerken, L. A. (2011). When global structure "explains away" evidence for local grammar: A Bayesian account of rule induction in tone sequences. Cognition.
Gerken, L. A., Balcomb, F. K., & Minton, J. (2011). Infants avoid "laboring in vain" by attending more to learnable than unlearnable linguistic patterns. Developmental Science.