Affiliated with the Developmental Division

I am interested in several areas of cognitive development. My primary area of research is language acquisition, with a focus on how children acquire verbs. For any given utterance of a verb, the referential scene offers many possible interpretations. My work investigates the cues children use to narrow the search space. So far, my work has identified two such cues: animacy, and sets of sentence frames. Currently, I am attempting to determine how children might integrate different cues when they are presented at different time points and in different referential contexts. My second area of research deals with how infants begin to make sense of the behaviors of others. I am interested in determining what psychological reasoning abilities infants have and when they come online. Research has shown that young infants can reason about others' goals and simple perceptions. My work examines whether they also have more complex abilities, such as the capacity to represent false beliefs and use those false beliefs to predict the behavior of others.

Representative Publications:

• Scott, R. M. & Baillargeon, R. (in press). Which penguin is this? Attributing false beliefs about identity at 18 months. Child Development.
• Scott, R. M. & Fisher, C. (in press). 2-year-olds use distributional cues to interpret transitivity-alternating verbs. Language and Cognitive Processes.
• Scott, R. M., Song, H., Baillargeon, R., & Leslie, A. M. (2008). Attributing false beliefs about objects' internal properties: Evidence from 18.5-month-old infants. Poster presented at the Biennial meeting of the International Society for Infant Studies.
• Scott, R. M. & Fisher, C. (2007). Combining syntactic frames and semantic roles to acquire verbs. Proceedings of the Boston University Conference on Language Development, 31, vol. 2, 555-566.
• Scott, R. M. & Fisher, C. (2006). Automatic classification of transitivity alternations in child-directed speech. In Proceeding of the 28th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2129-2134. http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/CSJarchive/Proceedings/2006/docs/p2129.pdf