

Assistant Professor
McGuinn Hall 522
Telephone: 617-552-0463
Email: joshua.hartshorne@bc.edu
PSYC5563 The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition
Language acquisition. Syntax. Semantics. Pragmatics. Critical periods in skill acquisition. The relationship between language and common sense. Syntactic and semantic bootstrapping. Methods include computational modeling, judgment studies, self-paced reading, eye-tracking, ERPs, crowdsourcing, and citizen science.
McGuinn 524
Dr. Hartshorne received his Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard University (advisor: Jesse Snedeker) and did his post-doctoral research at MIT with Josh Tenenbaum. Prior to graduate school, he worked with John Monahan, Yuhong Jiang, and Michael Ullman.
Hartshorne, J. K., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Pinker, S. (2018). A critical period for second language acquisition: Evidence from 2/3 million English speakers. Cognition.
Hartshorne, J. K., O’Donnell, T. J., Sudo, Y., Uruwashi, M., Lee, M., & Snedeker, J. (2016). Psych verbs, the linking problem, and the acquisition of language. Cognition.
Hartshorne, J. K., & Germine, L. T. (2015). When does cognitive functioning peak? The asynchronous rise and fall of different cognitive abilities across the life span. Psychological Science, 26(4):433–443.