Adele Goldberg is the Moses Taylor Pyne Professor of Psychology and Associate Chair at Princeton University. She leads the Psychology of Language Lab, where she conducts research on the usage-based constructionist approach to language, emphasizing emergent generalizations based on construction functions, input statistics, and domain-general cognitive processes. Dr. Goldberg's research spans construction grammar, language acquisition, metaphor processing, autism and language, neurolinguistics, and computational linguistics. Her groundbreaking work demonstrates that humans learn language through general cognitive processes rather than language-specific knowledge. She has shown that knowledge of language consists of form-function correspondences (constructions) and that conventional metaphors are more emotionally engaging than literal paraphrases, as evidenced by increased amygdala activation in fMRI studies. Her research on autism has revealed challenges faced by autistic individuals in language learning, particularly regarding flexible extension of word meanings and processing complex word meanings. She has extensively studied statistical preemption in language learning - how speakers learn to constrain generalizations based on the frequency of competing alternatives. Her work with Boyd demonstrated that younger children are less likely to generalize abstract constructions compared to older learners when exposed to the same input. Moses Taylor Pyne Professor of Psychology, Princeton University Associate Chair, Department of Psychology Director, Psychology of Language Lab Dr. Goldberg has mentored numerous students including Abby Fergus and collaborates extensively with researchers like Sammy Floyd, Arielle Belluck, and Karina Tachihara. Her recent work explores parallels between usage-based constructionist approaches and large language models, examining how both human and artificial systems learn from statistical patterns in language input.
