Month: September 2025

Tenure track faculty positions open to grad students at Boise

Boise State University is currently searching for a pair of tenure-track faculty positions in our Department of Psychology. We have two searches currently open, one with a broad area call and one focused on cognitive, biological, learning, or sensation and perception. Intended start dates for both positions are Fall (August) 2026.  More details about the positions and application instructions can be found here:
 
 
We are reaching out in hopes that you might be willing to share this open opportunity with your graduate students, and alumni who might be a good match. 

We sincerely appreciate any assistance you can provide in getting this opportunity in front of your students. If you have any questions or require further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact me at kristenmartin@boisestate.edu.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Kristen

KRISTEN MARTIN
Senior Recruiter
 
Human Resources and Workforce Strategy
Phone: 208-426-1657
Mail: 960 S. Broadway Ave., Suite 100, Boise, ID 83706

COGS Colloquium on 10/3: Dr. Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda from New York University

Cognitive Science Program Colloquium Series: Dr. Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda from New York University

Date/Time: Friday, 10/3/25 from 4:00pm – 5:30pm EST

Location: McHugh Hall 302

Meetings: If you are interested in meeting with Dr. Tamis-LeMonda during the day or attending dinner in the evening on Friday, please email crystal.mills@uconn.edu. 

Talk Title: Word learning in context: Disambiguating the ambiguous

Abstract: The pace and breadth of early vocabulary development is impressive to say the least. Infants grow from producing their first words around 12 months to using over 500 words by 2 ½ years. How do infants crack the code to acquire so many words in a relatively short period of time? Our theoretical framework emphasizes the embodied and embedded nature of learning: Infants actively engage with their environments in the presence of socially responsive partners who provide semantically relevant input within a tight time window during highly specific activity contexts. The tight temporal connection between infant action, caregiver speech, and activity context cuts across word classes—nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions—thereby functioning to ‘disambiguate the ambiguous’.

To illustrate the embodied and embedded nature of infant learning, I present several studies from our lab on infants’ exposure to different word classes in the ecologically-valid home environment. We videorecorded infants (12-24 months) and mothers during natural home activities (1 to 2 hours per visit, Ns=30-100). We transcribed interactions and identified all concrete nouns in mothers’ speech. We also marked mothers’ use of verbs and ‘math words’— adjectives and prepositions that refer to numbers, quantities (more, less), spatial relations (under, on top of), shapes, and magnitudes (big, long).
Annotations of the timing, behaviors, and contexts of infants’ speech exposure revealed several impactful characteristics: (1) Words in mothers’ speech contained high regularity in temporal structure. For example, mothers used the same word in a bout of repetition (e.g., dog, dog, dog; up, up, up) and they referenced objects from the same taxonomic category (e.g., animals) within a tight time window (e.g., dog, cat, horse); (2) Mothers provided multimodal input (speech with gesture/touch) that functioned to highlight word meaning; (3) Infants’ own actions were a reliable impetus for word exposure (e.g., verbs and spatial terms like walk, jump, down referred to infants’ movements through space), and (4) High regularity characterized the activity and location contexts of infants’ exposure to particular words (e.g., food nouns and words for magnitudes were frequent during snack time). Notably, characteristics of infants’ home experiences and language interactions predicted individual differences in skills across domains—including sustained attention, vocabulary growth, the production of words during interactions, school readiness and academic achievement years later. We discuss implications for theories of word learning and language interventions.