Dr Amy Perfors

Room 518, Hughes Building Phone +61 (08) 8303 5744 Fax +61 (08) 8303 3770 amy.perfors@adelaide.edu.au Personal Page

Area of Research

Cognitive science and language acquisition

Senior Appointments and Memberships

Cognitive Science Society

Society for Research and Child Development

Child Development Society

Member of Brain and Cognition Group

Awards

Walle Nauta Award for Continuing Dedication to Teaching (2007, 2006)

Angus MacDonald Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2005)

National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship (awarded 2004). Value: US $30,000 each year for three years (declined one)

National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship (awarded 2004). Value: US $30,000 each year for three years.

Psychology Research Interests

I'm interested many different questions in language acquisition, most centrally questions of learnability and domain specificity. What biases must children have in order to acquire knowledge in different domains (syntax, word and feature learning, understanding of kinds)? To what extent are these biases domain-general?

Recent Key Publications

Perfors, A., Tenenbaum, J.B., Regier, T. (under review) The learnability of abstract syntactic principles. Cognition.

Perfors, A., Tenenbaum, J.B., Gibson, E., Regier, T. (under review) How recursive is language? A Bayesian exploration. Linguistic Review.

Kemp, C., Perfors, A., Tenenbaum, J.B. (2007) Learning overhypotheses with hierarchical Bayesian models. Developmental Science 10(3). 307-321

Perfors, A., Tenenbaum, J., Regier, T. (2006) Poverty of the Stimulus? A rational approach. 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Vancouver, British Columbia.

Fernald, A., Perfors, A., Marchman, V. (2006) Picking Up Speed in Understanding: Speech Processing Efficiency and Vocabulary Growth Across the 2nd Year. Developmental Psychology 42(1). 98-116