Ruth Tincoff, PhD Assistant Professor Department of Psychology Bucknell University ruth.tincoff_at_bucknell_dot_edu 205 O'Leary Center 570-577-1787 Department Information page

Teaching I design courses around three goals: 1. make psychological science accessible and exciting 2. adapt to a range of student needs and backgrounds 3. support students' critical thinking and oral and written communication I am available during office hours to talk about your progress and how the course goals fit with your goals. Students also use office hours to introduce themselves, ask questions, or find out more information about their interests. Check my door for the current semester's office hours. Courses I regularly teach Psyc100 Introductory Psychology Psyc204 Human Cognition Psyc207 Developmental Psychology Psyc288 Applied Research Methods: Language Psyc300 Infancy Seminar Psyc315 Language Development Seminar Psyc329 Independent Study Courses I taught elsewhere or teach less frequently: Language and Cognition Seminar (co-taught with Heidi Lorimor), Memory, Sensation and Perception, Psychology of Language, Animal Cognition Seminar Websites for Students

Research     |     Lab website I investigate how infants identify words in spoken language and build a mental dictionary of sounds and meanings. Speech is continuous and it is our perceptual system that breaks the continuous sound stream into chunks of words, phrases, and individual sounds.  Infants have robust perceptual mechanisms from birth that help them solve this problem and contribute to their language learning. Other mechanisms come on-line during their development and help them map the sound forms onto objects, events, and concepts. This specific problem connects to my more general interests in language, animal communication, infant development, and how we learn new information. Bucknell News article

Selected papers and presentations

• Tincoff, R. & Jusczyk, P. W. (2011). Six-month-olds comprehend words for parts of the body. Infancy. DOI: 10.1111/j.1532-7078.2011.00084.x
  

• Tincoff, R. (May, 2010). Encouraging General Psychology students to integrate across levels and subfields. Poster presented at the Association for Psychological Science-Society for the Teaching of Psychology 17th Annual Teaching Institute, Boston, MA.

• Tincoff, R. (March 2007). Explaining word learning.  Paper presented in the Roundtable Discussion Symposium, Evolutionary Perspectives on Parent-Child Relationships, at the 2007 Meeting of the Society for Research on Child Development, Boston, MA.

• Tincoff, R. (March, 2006). Infants' attention to phonemic and nonphonemic word forms. Poster presented at the 2006 Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Baltimore, MD.

• Tincoff, R., & Hauser, M. D. (2006). The cognitive basis of language evolution in nonhuman primates. In K. Brown (Editor-in-Chief) and M. Naguib (Section Editor), The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edition: Animal Communication. Elsevier Science, Ltd.
  

• Tincoff, R., Hauser, M., Tsao, F., Spaepen, G., Ramus, F., & Mehler, J. (2005). The role of speech rhythm in language discrimination: Further tests with a nonhuman primate. Developmental Science, 8(1), 26-35.

• Tincoff, R. & Jusczyk, P. W. (1999). Some beginnings of word comprehension in six-month-olds. Psychological Science, 10, 172-175. Reprinted in D. Muir & A. Slater (Eds.), Infant development: The essential readings (pp. 270-278). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.