Our Research

For the most up-to-date list of publications, see our Google Scholar page.

Publications, Abstracts & Manuscripts

+ indicates undergraduate mentee; * indicates equal contribution

• +Yanowitz, A., +Bharti, M. & Floyd, S. (in preparation). Clumpy or Dispersed: Which is better for word learning, and why?
• *Floyd, S., *Jouravlev, O., Mineroff, Z., Poliak, M., Gibson, E. & Fedorenko, E. (2025). A tripartite structure of pragmatic language abilities: comprehension of social conventions, intonation processing, and causal reasoning. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
• +Sommer, S. & Floyd, S. (2025). The functional view of intuitive etymological explanations. Published in the Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
• Cuneo, N., Floyd, S., Goldberg, A.E. (2024). Word meaning is complex: Language-related generalization differences in autistic adults. Cognition, 244, 105691.
• Hu, J., Floyd, S., Jouravlev, O., Fedorenko, E., & Gibson, E. (2022). A fine-grained comparison of pragmatic language understanding in humans and language models. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers).
• Floyd, S., +Dalawella, K., Lew-Williams, C., Goldberg, A.E. & Griffiths, T. (2021). Modeling rules and similarity in colexification. Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
• Floyd, S., +Jeppsen, C. & Goldberg, A.E. (2020). Brief Report: Children on the Autism spectrum are challenged by complex word meanings. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
• Floyd, S., Goldberg, A.E. & Lew-Williams, C. (2020). Toddlers recognize multiple meanings of polysemous words. Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
• Floyd, S. & Goldberg, A.E. (2020). Children make use of relationships across meanings in word learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition.
• Floyd, S., Lew-Williams, C. & Goldberg, A.E. (2019). Children, more than adults, rely on similarity to access multiple meanings of words. Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
• +Hernandez, A., Floyd, S., & Goldberg, A.E. (2019). Productivity depends on communicative intention and accessibility, not thresholds. Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
• Jara-Ettinger, J., Floyd, S., Huey, H., Tenenbaum, J.B. & Schulz, L.E. (2019). Social Pragmatics: Preschoolers Rely on Commonsense Psychology to Resolve Referential Underspecification. Child Development.
• Jara-Ettinger, J., Floyd, S., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Schulz, L. E. (2017). Children understand that agents maximize expected utilities. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.