Terry Regier
Professor

language and thought

Group: Language & Cognition

Contact information

Web site: http://lclab.berkeley.edu

Personal statement

I study the relation of language and thought - exploring how universals of cognition shape languages, and to what extent speakers of different languages think differently.  Specific recent projects concern spatial language, kinship categories, color naming, word learning, and the “poverty of stimulus” argument in language learning.

Selected publications

Charles Kemp and Terry Regier (2012). Kinship categories across languages reflect general communicative principles.  Science, 336, 1049-1054. 

Stephani Foraker, Terry Regier, Naveen Khetarpal, Amy Perfors, and Joshua Tenenbaum (2009). Indirect evidence and the poverty of the stimulus: The case of anaphoric one. Cognitive Science, 33, 287-300.

Terry Regier, Paul Kay, and Naveen Khetarpal (2007). Color naming reflects optimal partitions of color space. PNAS, 104, 1436-1441.

Aubrey Gilbert, Terry Regier, Paul Kay, and Richard Ivry (2006). Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left. PNAS, 103, 489-494.