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Education

S.B., Brain and Cognitive Sciences, 1999
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Research supervisor: Kenneth Wexler

PhD. Student, Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, 2003-present
Brown University
Advisor: James L. Morgan
Dissertation title: Cross-category word use in acquisition: A preliminary investigation.
Anticipated date of defense: June, 2008.

Awards and Honors

2007-2008 Dissertation Fellowship, Brown University

2003 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, Honorable Mention

1999-2003 Robert C. Byrd Academic Scholarship

Teaching Experience

Summer 2007 Instructor: Language and the Mind (Enrollment: 18)

Spring 2007 Teaching Assistant: Perception, Illusion and the Visual Arts (Prof. W. Warren)

Fall 2006 Teaching Assistant: Introduction to Linguistic Theory (Prof. J. Sedivy)

Spring 2005 Teaching Assistant: Language and the Mind (Prof. J. Morgan)

Fall 2004 Teaching Assistant: Children’s Thinking: Introduction to Cognitive Development (Prof. D. Sobel)

Papers

Conwell, E. (in preparation). Sound, meaning, distribution and the development of lexical categories.

Conwell, E. & Morgan, J. (submitted). When parents verb nouns: Resolving the ambicategoricality problem.

Conwell, E. & Balas, B. J. (2007). Assessing the efficacy of transitional probabilities for learning grammatical categories. In D.S. McNamara & J.G. Trafton (eds.), Proceedings of the 29th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Soderstrom, M., White, K., Conwell, E. & Morgan, J. (2007). Receptive grammatical knowledge of familiar content words and inflection in 16-month-olds. Infancy, 12, 1-29.

Conwell, E. & Morgan, J. (2007). Resolving grammatical category ambiguity in acquisition. In H. Caunt-Nulton, S. Kulatilake and I. Woo (eds.), Proceedings of the 31st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Conwell, E. & Demuth, K. (2007). Early syntactic productivity: Evidence from dative shift. Cognition, 103, 163-179.

Balas, B. J., Cox, D. & Conwell E. (2006). The effect of personal familiarity on the speed of face recognition. In R. Sun (ed.), Proceedings of the 28th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Conwell, E. (2006). The role of semantic generality in verb acquisition. In D. Bamman, T. Magnitskaia and C. Zaller (eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Presentations and Talks

Conwell, E. & Morgan, J. (2008). Learning about cross-category word use: The role of prosodic cues. Poster presented at the 16th International Conference on Infant Studies, Vancouver.

Soderstrom, M. & Conwell, E. (2008). How infants acquire grammatical categories: The role of distributional, prosodic and phonotactic information in the acquisition of noun and verb categories. Symposium presented at the 16th International Conference on Infant Studies, Vancouver.

Conwell, E. (2007). Verbing nouns and nouning verbs: Why language is not a complete impediment to acquisition. Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences Colloquium, Brown University, Providence, RI.

Conwell, E. (2007). Resolving the problem of category ambiguity in language acquisition. CogLunch, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA.

Conwell, E. (2005). Problems in the acquisition of verb argument structure. Guest lecture for “Current issues in speech and language pathology,” Prof. K. Froud. Teachers’ College, Columbia University, New York, NY.

Soderstrom, M., White, K. & Conwell, E. (2005). Evidence for grammatical knowledge of content words and inflection in 16-month-olds. 30th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, MA.

Conwell, E. & Demuth, K. (2005). Verb productivity and dative shift. 10th International Congress for the Study of Child Language, Berlin.

Soderstrom, M., White, K., Conwell, E. & Morgan, J. (2005). Sixteen-month-olds are beginning to form categories of “noun” and “verb.” 10th International Congress for the Study of Child Language, Berlin.