Faculty

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 infants' early experiences 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? How is infants' learning adapted to their early environments?) And in adulthood, how do we get such rich meanings from each other's utterances in conversation, when words are so vague? Ruthe's research combines experimental and observational methods, in contexts ranging from rural indigenous to industrialized, multilingual to monolingual, speaking to signing...to identify the social-cognitive mechanisms underlying everyday communicative success across the lifespan. 

PhD 2020 Developmental Psychology, University of California, Berkeley

BA 2013 Linguistics, Harvard College

Foushee, R. & Srinivasan, M. (2024). Infants who are rarely spoken to nevertheless understand many words. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(23), e2311425121. (Open Access article)

Casillas, M., Foushee, R., Méndez Girón, J., Polian, G., & Brown, P. (2024). Little evidence for a noun bias in Tseltal spontaneous speech. First Language, 0(0). [preprint]

Meylan, S. C., Foushee, R., Bergelson, E., & Levy, R. (2023). How adults understand what young children say. Nature Human Behavior, 7, 2111–2125. [preprint]

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]