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Rissman, Horton, & Goldin-Meadow (2023). Universal constraints on linguistic event categories: a cross-cultural study of child homesign. Psychological Science.

Are there constraints on how languages categorize events involving tools (e.g., knife-cutting)? We found alignment across spoken language users and homesigners, suggesting ways of conceptualizing tool events that are so prominent as to constitute a universal constraint. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221140328

Rissman, van Putten, & Majid (2022). Evidence for a shared instrument prototype from English, Dutch and German. Cognitive Science.

Imagine someone eats ice cream with a spoon and then cuts bread on a cutting board – are the spoon and the cutting board part of the same category Instrument or different categories? We find a shared Instrument prototype across English, Dutch, and German: an Instrument is an extension of an intentional agent. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13140

Rissman (2022). Measuring meaning: Alignment and misalignment across indices of verb semantics. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (44), 1713-1719

The particular context of a task can strongly influence how verb meaning affects psycholinguistic behavior.

Rissman & Lupyan (2021). A dissociation between conceptual prominence and explicit category learning: evidence from Agent and Patient event roles. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Agent and Patient roles are important in language but not are necessarily part of adult English speakers’ explicit reasoning about categories. At the same time, these roles have similar prototype structure across linguistic and conceptual domains. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001146

Rissman & Lupyan (2021). Lions, tigers, and bears: Conveying a superordinate category without a superordinate label. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (43), 2936-2942.

Do superordinate categories like ‘desserts’ have a different meaning than exemplar lists like ‘cake, ice cream, pie, and so on’? Yes: English speakers represent the former in a more stable, consistent way

Rissman & Jacobs (2020). Responding to the climate crisis: the importance of virtual conferencing post-pandemic. Collabra: Psychology.

We surveyed hundreds of cognitive scientists and found that average conference travel in 2019 was environmentally unsustainable. https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.17966

Rissman, L., Horton, L., Flaherty, M., Senghas, A., Coppola, M., Brentari, D., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2020). The communicative importance of agent-backgrounding: Evidence from homesign and Nicaraguan Sign Language. Cognition.

A young sign language innovates structures that downplay the agent of an action. This suggests that being able to convey our subjective experience is a crucial function of language, casting doubt on the idea that passive voice is bad for communication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104332

Rissman & Majid (2019). Thematic roles: Core knowledge or linguistic construct? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

A range of psycholinguistic, typological and developmental evidence indicates that the role Agent is part of core knowledge. For the roles Goal, Recipient and Instrument, however, evidence for cognitive universals is much more tenuous. https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-019-01634-5

Rissman, Woodward & Goldin-Meadow (2019). Occluding the face diminishes the conceptual accessibility of an animate agent. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience.

English speakers are more likely to describe events with passive voice when they cannot see the face of the agent. This suggests that visual prominence has a strong effect on how we think about events. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23273798.2018.1525495

Rissman, Rawlins & Landau (2019).  Event participants and verbal semantics:  non-discrete structure in English, Spanish and Mandarin. In A.K. Goel, C.M. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp. 960-966). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

Verbs in Spanish and Mandarin such as cortar ('cut') and cì ('stab') encode an instrument through a non-discrete semantic structure rather than through argument structure. This result is similar to the English findings in Rissman et al. (2015).

Rissman & Majid (2019). Agency drives category structure in instrumental events. In A.K. Goel, C.M. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp. 2661-2667). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

The most prototypical instrumental events in English involve an intentional agent, where the instrument is a direct extension of the agent.

Rissman, Goldin-Meadow & Woodward (2018). From visual prominence to event construal: influences (and non-influences) of eyegaze. In T.T. Rogers, M. Rau, X. Zhu & C.W. Kalish (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2334-2339). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

When people watch videos of an agent and a patient, they are more likely to direct their early eyegaze to the agent when the agent's face is visible than when it is occluded.

Rissman & Rawlins (2017). Ingredients of instrumental meaning. Journal of Semantics.

English with & use (e.g. Vivienne sliced the pumpkin with a knife) encode different features of instrumentality, inconsistent with the theory that Instrument is a primitive semantic category. https://academic.oup.com/jos/article-abstract/34/3/507/3829479

Rissman & Goldin-Meadow (2017). The development of causal structure without a language model. Language Learning and Development

In a longitudinal case study of a child homesigner, we show that this child uses handshape morphology to encode causation, but only after a lengthy developmental period. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15475441.2016.1254633?journalCode=hlld20

Cartmill, Rissman, Novack & Goldin-Meadow (2017). The emergence of iconic features in co-speech gesture and homesign. Language, Interaction and Acquisition

The gestures of hearing children and the signs of a deaf homesigning child appear to be structured based on the same fundamental building blocks. https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/lia.8.1.03car

Rissman, Rawlins & Landau (2015). Using instruments to understand argument structure: evidence for gradient representation. Cognition

English verbs such as slice and poke encode an instrument, but not through a discrete argument structure. When we consider how verbs encode relations between event participants, there are possibilities beyond the familiar one-participant, two-participant and three-participant categories. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010027715001122?via%3Dihub

Rissman (2015). Cinderella broke and broke: object deletion and manner-result complementarity. CLS 51

Syntactic judgments and corpus data show that instrumental verbs like slice share properties of both manner verbs and result verbs, supporting the theory that verbal roots can be linked to more than one part of event structure, inconsistent with manner-result complementarity.

Rissman, Legendre, Landau (2013). Abstract morphosyntax in two and three-year-old children: evidence from priming. Language Learning and Development

A production priming experiment showed that children represent auxiliary is (e.g. the pig is jumping) and auxiliary are (e.g. the birds are singing) as part of the same abstract category.

Rissman (2013). Periphrastic use: a modal account of instrumentality. NELS 41

Instrumental use (e.g. Vivian used a knife to slice the pumpkin) encodes quantification over worlds compatible with the goals of an agent.

Rissman (2011). Instrumental with and use: modality and implicature. SALT 21

Goal-based interpretations of instrumental with sentences are generated pragmatically.

Rissman (2010). Instrumental with, locatum with and the argument/adjunct distinction. LSA 2010

Semantic and syntactic diagnostics indicate that locata (e.g., Bill stuffed the cabbage with rice) pattern like arguments, whereas instruments (e.g. Bill stuffed the cabbage with a spoon) pattern like adjuncts. At the same time,  argumenthood is more gradient rather than categorical.