Barbara Malt, Professor
333 Chandler Hall, 610.758.4797
bcm0@lehigh.edu
personal page

Academic History
Stanford University, Ph.D., 1982, Psychology
Wesleyan University, B.A., 1978, Psychology

Research Interests
Cognition, language and concepts, models of categorization, comprehension and use of reference, word meaning, the relation of language to thought. 

Current projects include testing theories of naming and categorization by assessing the relation of similarity to naming; by studying how names are selected for unfamiliar objects in a referential communication task; by studying how names are assigned to familiar objects in English by non-native speakers of English; and by examining the structure of categories defined by verbs.

Teaching Interests
Psychology of Language
Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive Science
Research Methods

Selected Publications
Malt, B.C., Gennari, S., Imai, M., Ameel, E., Tsuda, N., & Majid, A. (in press). Talking about walking: Biomechanics and the language of locomotion. Psychological Science.

Malt, B. C. and Sloman, S. A. (2007). Category essence or essentially pragmatic? Creator's intention in naming and what's really what. Cognition, 105, 615-648.

Ameel, E., Storms, G., Malt, B., & Sloman, S. A. (2005). How bilinguals solve the naming problem. Journal of Memory and Language, 53, 60-80.

Malt, B.C., Sloman, S.A., and Gennari, S. (2003). Speaking vs. thinking about objects and actions. In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.) Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought (pp. 81-111). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Malt, B.C., Sloman, S.A., and Gennari, S. (2003). Universality and language specificity in object naming. Journal of Memory and Language, 49, 20-42

Malt, B. C. and Sloman, S. A. (2003). Linguistic diversity and object naming by non-native speakers of English. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6, 47-67

Gennari, S., Sloman, S.A., Malt, B. C., and Fitch, W.T. (2002). Motion events in language and cognition. Cognition, 83, 49-79.

Malt, B.C., Sloman, S.A., Gennari, S., Shi, M., & Wang, Y. (1999). Knowing versus naming: Similarity and the linguistic categorization of artifacts. Journal of Memory and Language, 40, 230-262.