Affiliated with the Developmental Division

I'm interested in language acquisition and infant cognition.

My main line of research investigates how young children acquire and use syntactic (and semantic cues) in verb learning and sentence comprehension. I also examine whether some of these cues are potential starting point for verb learning by testing young learners of English as well as Mandarin Chinese.

My other line of research focuses on the developmental changes in infants' understanding of physical events. Specifically, I am interested in the kinds of causal knowledge infants bring to bear in their interpretation of the physical world, as well as the potential processes by which they come to do so.

Representative Publications:

• Yuan, S., & Fisher, C. (2009). "Really? She blicked the baby?": Two-year-olds learn combinatorial facts about verbs by listening. Psychological Science, 20, 619-626.
• Baillargeon, R., Li., J., Ng., W., & Yuan, S. (2009). An account of infants' physical reasoning. In A. Woodward & A. Needham (Eds.), Learning and the infant mind (pp. 66-116). New York: Oxford University Press.
• Snedeker, J., & Yuan, S. (2008). Effects of prosodic and lexical constraints on parsing in young children (and adults). Journal of Memory and Language, 58, 574-608.
• Yuan, S., & Fisher, C. (2006). "Really? He blicked the cat?": Two-year-olds learn distributional facts about verbs in the absence of a referential context. Proceedings of the Thirtieth Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Boston, MA: Cascadilla Press.
• Snedeker, J., Li, P., & Yuan, S. (2003). Cross-cultural differences in the input to early word learning. Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.