Alan Kersten

Associate Professor
Ph.D. Georgia Tech '95
Research Area: Cognitive, Developmental


Contact Information:
Office: 208 Behavioral Science
Telephone: (561) 297-0017
Fax: (561) 297-2160
E-mail: akersten@fau.edu

General Research Interests

My research investigates how people learn to use language to convey information about perceived events. My research investigates language learning in both children and adults, with the goal of understanding how children and adults differ in their language learning competencies and language learning strategies. A better understanding of these differences could allow for the creation of better techniques for training adults to use a second language. As part of this general goal of understanding how people learn to represent events in language, my research also examines the nature of event representations in nonlinguistic cognition. A better understanding of the mapping between event representations in language and in nonlinguistic cognition could allow for a better understanding of why some aspects of language learning are relatively easy (because they can be directly mapped onto nonlinguistic cognitive representations) and why some aspects of language learning are very difficult (because no such direct mappings are possible).

Representative Publications

Kersten, A.W., & Smith, L.B. (2002). Attention to novel objects during verb learning. Child Development, 73, 93-109.

Kersten, A.W., & Earles, J.L. (2004). Semantic context influences memory for verbs more than memory for nouns. Memory & Cognition, 32, 198-211.

Kersten, A.W. (1998). A division of labor between nouns and verbs in the representation of motion. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 127, 34-54.

Links: Personal Home Page