Maria Vazquez
Graduate Student
Research Area: Developmental Science
I am a 5th year PhD student at Vanderbilt University studying developmental psychology and working at the Language Development Lab with Dr. Megan Saylor. I am interested in how children acquire language through social interactions. Children receive a great deal of linguistic input and often need to make judgments about what others know. My research investigates the inferences that children make about others' knowledge based on what they have seen them do in the past.
Representative Publications
Vazquez, M.D., Delisle, S., & Saylor, M. (in press). Four- and six-year-olds use pragmatic competence to guide word learning. Journal of Child Language.
Saylor, M.M., Ganea, P., & Vazquez, M.D. (2011). What's mine is mine: Twelve-month-olds use possessive pronouns to identify speakers' referents. Developmental Science, 14, 859-864.
Vazquez, M.D., Saylor, M.M., & Krensky, L. (in prep). Nonverbal cues facilitate children’s recognition of violations of Gricean maxims.
Vazquez, M.D., Saylor, M.M., & Carroll, C.B. (in prep). Preschoolers use verbal reminders of shared experience to disambiguate reference during word learning.
Saylor, M.M., Vazquez, M.D., & Levin, D.T. (in prep). Audience effects on overimitation.
Conference Talks
Vazquez, M.D., Doscas, M.E., & Saylor, M.M. (2011) Children Use Adherence to Gricean Maxims as a Cue to Speaker Reliability. In E. Filippova, & C. Schulze, (Chairs), Pragmatic Inferencing in Young Children. Symposium conducted at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Montreal, Canada.
Vazquez, M.D., & Saylor, M.M. (2011) Children use pragmatic competence as evidence for the reliability of an information source. Talk given at the Beyond the Words Conference. University of Leipzig, Germany.
Conference Posters
Vazquez, M.D., Saylor, M.M., & Levin, D.T. (2010). Student computers: six-year-olds believe that computers can learn. Poster presented at the International Conference on Development and Learning. Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Vazquez, M.D., & Saylor. M. (May 2010). Do children use pragmatic competence as evidence for the reliability of an information source? Oral presentation, Beyond the Words Conference, Leipzig, Germany.
Vazquez, M.D., Delisle, S., & Saylor, M. (June 2009). Children and adults' use of conversational cues when selecting sources of information. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Jean Piaget Society, Park City, Utah.
Herberg, J., Vazquez, M., Saylor, M. & Levin, D. (2008). Processing of Action Goals in Infancy. Poster presented at the International Conference on Infant Studies, March 27-29 Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Kaldy, Z., Blaser, E. & Vazquez, M. (2007). Infants’ visual working memory for shape vs. luminance tested with equally salient objects. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Vision Eastern Psychological Association, March 22-25, Philadelphia, PA.
Invited Talks
Vazquez, M.D., & Saylor, M.M. (2011) Children use pragmatic competence as evidence for the reliability of an information source. Talk given at the Max Planck Institute, Leipzig, Germany.