Profile
Ruthe Foushee is an Assistant Professor of Psychology (Cognitive, Social, and Developmental) and Director of the Human Language and Development Lab at The New School for Social Research.
Ruthe Foushee's primary research concerns two processes that are more resilient than science can explain: (1) human (linguistic) communication, and (2) children's development of language. How — when there is such tremendous variability in the structure of infants' early environments across the world — does children's language learning vary so little? (What is in common across the apparent diversity of human contexts and of infant learners such that this is possible?) In adulthood, how do we get such rich meanings from each other's utterances in conversation, when words are so vague? Their research combines experimental and observational methods, in contexts ranging from rural indigenous to industrialized, multilingual to monolingual, speaking to signing...to robustly identify the socio-cognitive mechanisms underlying everyday communicative success.
Degrees Held
PhD 2020 Developmental Psychology, University of California, Berkeley
BA 2013 Linguistics, Harvard College
Professional Affiliation
Cognitive Development Society (CDS), Cognitive Science Society, Ethical Science of Language Development (ESLD), Jean Piaget Society (JPS), LangVIEW Consortium, Latin American Network for Language Acquisition Research (LatiNLAR), Linguistics Society of America (LSA), Mathematical Cognition and Learning Society (MCLS), Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators, Society for Language Development (SLD), Society of Philosophy and Psychology (SPP), Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD)
Recent Publications
Foushee, R., Srinivasan, M., & Xu, F. (2023). Active learning in language development. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 32(3). [preprint]
Cristia, A., Foushee, R., Aravena-Bravo, P., Cychosz, M., Scaff, C., & Casillas, M. (2023). Combining observational and experimental approaches to the development of language and communication in rural samples: Opportunities and challenges. Journal of Child Language, Mar 13;1-23. [preprint]
Foushee, R. & Casillas, M. (2022). What 'diversity’ means depends on your perspective: A commentary on Kidd & Garcia (2022). First Language, 42(6). [preprint]
Foushee, R., Byrne, D., Casillas, M., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2022). Getting to the root of linguistic alignment: Testing the predictions of Interactive Alignment across developmental and biological variation in language skill. In Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [preprint]
Foushee, R., Srinivasan, M., & Xu, F. (2021). Self-directed learning by preschoolers in a naturalistic overhearing context. Cognition, 206, 104415. [preprint]
Ellwood-Lowe, M., Foushee, R., & Srinivasan, M. (2021). What causes the word gap? Financial concerns may systematically suppress child-directed speech. Developmental Science, e13151. [preprint]
O’Donnell, M., Dev, A. S., Antonoplis, S., Baum, S. M., Benedetti, A. H., Brown, N. D., Carrillo, B., Choi, A., Connor, P., Donnelly, K., Ellwood-Lowe, M. E., Foushee, R., Jansen, R., Jarvis, S. N., Lundell-Creagh, R., Ocampo, J. M., Okafor, G. N., Rahmani Azad, Z., Rosenblum, M., Schatz, D., Stein, D. H., Wang, Y., Moore, D. A., & Nelson, L. D. (2021). Empirical audit and review and an assessment of evidentiary value in research on the psychological consequences of scarcity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(44), e2103313118.
Meylan, S. C., Foushee, R., Bergelson, E., & Levy, R. (2021). Child-directed listening: How caregiver inference enables children's early verbal communication. In Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Shtulman, A., Foushee, R., Barner, D., Dunham, Y., & Srinivasan, M. (2019). When Allah meets Ganesha: Developing supernatural concepts in a religiously diverse society. Cognitive Development, 52, 100806. [preprint]
Srinivasan, M., Foushee, R., Bartnof, A. & Barner, D (2019). Linguistic conventionality and the role of epistemic reasoning in mutual exclusivity inference. Cognition, 189, 193–208. [preprint]
Foushee, R., Jansen, R., & Srinivasan, M. (2017). What counts as math? Relating conceptions of math with anxiety about math. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Foushee, R. & Srinivasan, M. (2017). Could both be right? Children's and adults' sensitivity to subjectivity in language. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Srinivasan, M., Al-Mughairy, S., Foushee, R., & Barner, D. (2017). Learning language from within: Children use semantic generalizations to infer new word meanings. Cognition, 159, 11–24. [preprint]
Foushee, R., Falkou, N., & Li, P. (2016). ‘Two-pound cookies’ or ‘two pounds of cookies’: Children’s appreciation of quantity expressions. Language Acquisition, 24(4), 400–416.
Foushee, R., Griffiths, T., & Srinivasan, M. (2016). Lexical complexity of child-directed and overheard speech: Implications for learning. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Foushee, R. & Xu, F. (2016). Active overhearing: Development in preschoolers' skill at 'listening in' to naturalistic overheard speech. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Al-Mughairy, S., Foushee, R., Srinivasan, M., & Barner, D. (2015). Daxing with a dax: Evidence of productive lexical structures in children. In Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Additional Writing
Ellwood-Lowe, M., Foushee, R., & Srinivasan, M. (2021). Response to Flournoy (2021): Reflections on the benefits and challenges of communicating the results of a pre-registered study.
Hadani, H., Kennedy, K., Foushee, R., & Jaeger, G. (2017). Curious minds: What research tells us about building STEM connections in early childhood.
*Hadani, H. & *Foushee, R. (2016). Reimagining school readiness: A literature review.
Performances and Appearances
Selected Coverage
Featured in "Expect the Unexpected: Studying Language Acquisition in Small-Scale Societies," International Congress of Infant Studies Baby Blog, Fall 2022.
Featured in "Financial strain may suppress speech between parents and children, UC Berkeley lab finds" The Daily Californian, July 2021.
Featured in "Let me Touch Your Mind," KPOO San Francisco Performing Arts and Science Interviews, September 2020. [recording]
Research Interests
linguistic and non-linguistic communication, cross-cultural/comparative/multimodal language development, caregiver-child interaction, language socialization, overhearing, self-directed/active learning, child-directed language, semantic/pragmatic development, epistemic development, vagueness, linguistic relativity, environmental effects on mechanisms of learning, selective attention, socioeconomic status, multilingualism, ecological validity in research methods
Portfolio
Personal Website
Lab Website