People
Post-Doctoral Researcher
Ph.D., Northwestern University, 2006
Lab
Language & Cognition Lab, 401 Wolf Hall
(302) 831-8827
Ann Bunger
language acquisition and processing, event representation, word learning
How do children learn to make sense of the world around them, and how do they learn to describe it? In my research, I use experimental methodologies like preferential looking and eyetracking to investigate the mapping between conceptual and linguistic representations of events. I am especially interested in understanding how event construal and description differ across languages and with linguistic and conceptual development. Specific areas of interest include how children represent and label multi-part events like causatives and motion events, what crosslinguistic patterns of linguistic encoding can tell us about event construal, and how early conceptual knowledge might provide a foundation for universal linguistic categories.
Recent Publications
Bunger, A., Trueswell, J., & Papafragou, A. "Event apprehension for language production in children." Paper to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Baltimore, MD, January 7-10, 2010.
Bunger, A., Trueswell, J., & Papafragou, A. 2009. "Seeing and Saying: The Relation Between Event Apprehension and Utterance Formulation in Children." Paper presented at the Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, MA, November 6-8.
Bunger, A., Trueswell, J., & Papafragou, A. 2009. "What You See is Not What You Get: Event Apprehension and Utterance Formulation in Children and Adults." Paper presented at the 15th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP), Barcelona, Spain, September 7-9.
Bunger, A. 2008. How We Learn to Talk About Events: Linguistic Constraints on Verb Learning. Language Acquisition, 15.1.
