Sammy Floyd
I earned my PhD in the Psychology department at Princeton University, working with Adele E. Goldberg and Casey Lew-Williams, and my BA at Smith College working with Jill de Villiers. I'm interested in language (especially words), language change and comprehension, and how adults and children learn (especially from a neurodiversity perspective).
Publications
📕 = journal publication🏫 = co-authors include an undergraduate mentee
📘 = six page, peer-reviewed proceedings paper
Cuneo, N., Floyd, S. & Goldberg, A.E. (2024). Word meaning is complex: Language-related generalization differences in autistic adults Cognition. 📕 Floyd, S.* Jouravlev, O.*, Mineroff, Z., Gibson, E. & Fedorenko, E. (under review). A tripartite structure of pragmatic language abilities: comprehension of social conventions, intonation processing, and causal reasoning Hu., J., Floyd, S., Jouravlev, O., Gibson, E. & Fedorenko, E. (2023). A fine-grained comparison of pragmatic language understanding in humans and language models Floyd, S., Dalawella, K., Goldberg, A.E., Lew-Williams, C. & Griffiths, T. (2021). Modeling rules and similarity in colexification Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. 📘 🏫 Floyd, S. , Jeppsen, C. & Goldberg, A.E. (2020). Children on the Autism spectrum are challenged by complex word meanings. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. 📕 🏫
Floyd, S., Goldberg, A.E. & Lew-Williams, C. (2020). Toddlers recognize multiple meanings of polysemous words. Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. 📘 Floyd, S. & Goldberg, A.E. (2020). Children make use of relationships across meanings in word learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition. 📕
Floyd, S., Lew-Williams, C. & Goldberg, A.E. (2019). Children, more than adults, rely on similarity to access multiple meanings of words. Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. 📘 Hernandez, A., Floyd, S., & Goldberg, A.E. (2019). Productivity depends on communicative intention and accessibility, not thresholds. Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. 📘 🏫 Jara‐Ettinger, J., Floyd, S., Huey, H., Tenenbaum, J.B. and Schulz, L.E. (2019). Social Pragmatics: Preschoolers Rely on Commonsense Psychology to Resolve Referential Underspecification. Child Development. 📕 Barak, L., Floyd, S. & Goldberg, A.E. (2019). Modeling the Acquisition of Words with Multiple Meanings. Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics: Vol. 2 , Article 23. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7275/tr21-m273 Jara-Ettinger, J., Floyd, S., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Schulz, L. E. (2017). Children understand that agents maximize expected utilities. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.📕