Daoxin Li: Institute for Policy Research

Daoxin Li

IPR Postdoctoral Fellow

PhD, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania

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Daoxin Li is a Postdoctoral Fellow working with IPR psychologist Sandra Waxman at the Infant and Child Development Center of Northwestern University. Her research focuses on the cognitive mechanisms of language development: How do infants and children discover the grammar of their language? Why do they seem to be better at language learning than adults? What is the relation between language development and other cognitive abilities? She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2024, where her dissertation examined the learnability of syntactic generalizations from distributional cues in the input across different languages.

Selected publications:
Li, D. and Schuler, K. 2024. Children can use distributional cues to acquire recursive structures. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46, 1925-1932.

Li, D., Yue, C. S., and Trueswell, J. 2024. Is it a bat or a thing? Referential contrast in the learning of homophones and superordinate terms. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46, 2301-2307.

Li, D. and Schuler, K. D. 2023. Acquiring recursive structures through distributional learning. Language Acquisition, 30 (3–4), 323–336. doi: 10.1080/10489223.2023.2185522