Research
Papers
Pophristic, S. & Degen, J. 2022. Pragmatic use of morphological information in Serbo-Croatian redundant referring expression production. In Frau, F., Bischetti, L., Pompei, C., Scaligni, B., Domaneschi, F., & Bambini, V., Book of Abstracts - XPRAG 2022.
Degen, J. & Pophristic, S. 2022. The role of production expectations in visual world paradigm linking hypotheses. In J. Culbertson, A. Perfors, H. Rabagliati, and V. Ramenzoni (Eds.), Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
Pophristic, S. & Schuler, K. 2021. The role of gender in the acquisition of the Serbian case system. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 6(1). 896-905.
Pophristic, S. 2021. Priming of gender interpretability of Spanish nouns. Unpublished Honors Thesis, University of Pennsylvania.
Talks/Presentations
Pophristic*, Waldon , & Degen, 2022. Pragmatic use of morphological information in Serbo-Croatian redundant referring expression production. (Poster) 9th Experimental Pragmatics (XPrag) Conference 2022, Pavia, Italy.
Degen & Pophristic*, 2022. The role of production expectations in visual world paradigm linking hypotheses. Cognitive Science Society Annual Conference 2022, Toronto, Canada.
Pophristic* & Schuler, 2021. The role of gender in the acquisition of the Serbian case system. (Poster Presentation) LSA Annual Meeting, virtual.
Pophristic*, 2021. The role of gender in the acquisition of the Serbo-Croatian case system. University of Pennsylvania's University Scholar's lunch talk, virtual.
* Main presenter
Lab Affiliations
ALPS Lab, Stanford
For the 2021-22 academic year, I worked as the lab manager for Judith Degen's ALPS Lab at Stanford. In the lab we explore both comprehension and production through computational modeling and experimental paradigms. I am currently working on two projects. The first asks whether people use sub-lexical units pragmatically by looking at, in BCS (Serbo-Croatian), whether a unique gender of a target object can modulate the rate of redundant adjective use in a referential utterance. In order to model participant behavior and assess these effects, I modified a version of Dr. Noah Goodman's RSA model. The second project is focused on the testing the implicit linking hypothesis in eye-tracking studies, i.e. that looks to an object are correlated with belief that the object is the intended referent of an utterance, and whether surprisal of linguistic input in the utterances affects this belief. Past work that helped shape these studies can be found here and here.
Child Language Lab, University of Pennsylvania
During undergrad, I worked with Dr. Kathryn Schuler at the Child Language Lab, where I received training in running studies with (incredibly adorable) child participants. I developed a project assessing which linguistic input children use to acquire their nominal inflection system in BCS (Serbo-Croatian). I applied Dr. Charles Yang's tolerance principle to nouns found in the CHILDES corpus, and argued that there was enough evidence in the input for children to learn their inflectional system from a noun's gender without ever having to posit noun classes. I designed an follow up study, assessing whether children productively utilized this correlation between gender and inflection through a modified wug task. However, due to COVID-19, child participants were never run.
Embick Lab, University of Pennsylvania
While working with the Embick lab, I began wondering how psycholinguistic evidence and theories of the grammar interact. With the help of Dr. David Embick, I developed a senior thesis with the main questions: 1) Is there evidence of (grammatical) gender priming without overt syntactic agreement, and 2) is there evidence for a difference between interpretable and uninterpretable gender (e.g. chica vs. silla = girl.fem vs. chair.fem respectively) via priming. I developed and implemented an auditory lexical decision task to answer both of these questions.