Faculty

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 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. 

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. (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]

Performances and Appearances

Interviews

• "Expect the unexpected: Studying language acquisition in small-scale societies," International Congress of Infant Studies Blog, Fall 2022.
• "Financial strain may suppress speech between parents and children, UC Berkeley lab finds" The Daily Californian, July 2021.
• "Let me Touch Your Mind," KPOO San Francisco Performing Arts and Science Interviews, September 2020. [recording]

Selected Research Coverage

Comparative language development

• "Talking to your infant is likely a modern phenomenon. Here’s why," Big Think, July 2024.
• "Overhearing conversations helps Tseltal Maya infants learn language effectively," News-Medical: Life Sciences, June 2024.
• "How we learn language across communities and cultures," Berkeley Talks, August 2022.

Financial inequality and early language

• "We need to stop blaming parents for the 'word gap'—Here's why," Yahoo, August 2021.
• "Financial hardships, income inequality affect how many words kids hear from parents, study says," Washington Post, July 2021.
• "When money's tight, parents talk less to kids; could this explain the word gap?" Science Daily, July 2021.
• "Parents' financial troubles may affect communication with kids, study finds," Consumer Affairs, July 2021.
• "When faced with financial insecurity, moms talk to their children less," Moms, July 2021.
• "Por que pais mais pobres conversam menos com os filhos?" Gizmodo Brasil, July 2021.
• The Attitude with Arnie Arnesen, July 2021.

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