Aja Altenhof

About

I'm a fourth-year PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, working in the Lupyan Lab and the Infant Learning Lab.

I'm interested in how meanings are learned, carved up in semantic space, and changed through use. Much of my work focuses on contrast, both as a tool for learning and as an organizing principle. A dog is not a book, but for a learner, it matters more that a dog is not a cat. Does contrast between the most similar, and most confusable, referents aid learning? How do semantic systems draw contrasts between words that minimize overlap while maximizing coverage?

Before Madison, I completed an MSc in the Evolution of Language and Cognition at the University of Edinburgh with Kenny Smith, and a BA in Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where I worked with Gareth Roberts in the Cultural Evolution of Language Lab. I then spent a year as a Research Specialist on the 1kD Project at Princeton.

Publications

Journal Articles

2023

Information quality, not quantity, impacts the differentiation of near-synonyms

Altenhof, A. & Roberts, G. Language and Cognition, 15(4), 854–883.

DOI

Preprints

2026

The First 1,000 Days (1kD) Project: Collecting and analyzing an ultra-dense naturalistic dataset of human baby development

Raviv, H., Hasenfratz, L., Gousios, K., Faryna, M., Beaty, R., Johnson, D., Chen, B., Altenhof, A., Ryan, B., Greenberg, C. A., Hong, Z., Assayag, G., Tsyhanov, A., Malakhov, V., Rosenwein, T., Raviv, O., Lew-Williams, C., & Hasson, U. bioRxiv.

bioRxiv

The First 1000 Days: An agent-based model of early language acquisition

Raviv, H., Tsyhanov, A., Gousios, K., Altenhof, A., Wang, H., Chen, B., Raviv, O., Rosenwein, T., Lew-Williams, C., Hasenfratz, L., & Hasson, U. bioRxiv.

bioRxiv

Conference Proceedings

2026

Finding the conceptual glue: Ad-hoc categorization in people and LLMs

Altenhof, A.*, Breeden, K.*, & Lupyan, G. Proceedings of the 48th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

eScholarship

Making room for new words

Bergey, C.*, Altenhof, A.*, Burnham, C. V., Lee, O., & Hawkins, R. Proceedings of the 48th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

eScholarship

Semantics in action: Nameability predicts verb extension

Flanigan, E., Altenhof, A., & Lupyan, G. Proceedings of the 48th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

eScholarship
2025

The role of contrast in category learning

Altenhof, A. & Lupyan, G. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

eScholarship
2023

A weak bias against strong synonymy?

Altenhof, A. Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

eScholarship
2021

Labels, even arbitrary ones, facilitate categorization

Altenhof, A. & Roberts, G. Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

eScholarship

Talks

2026

What is needed for stable synonymy?

Altenhof, A. & Roberts, G. EVOLANG 16, Plovdiv.

New words are assumed to have specific and atypical meanings

Bergey, C., Altenhof, A., & Hawkins, R. EVOLANG 16, Plovdiv.

2025

Not-a corpus: Characterizing parents' use of contrast in negated utterances

Mankewitz, J., Altenhof, A., Bergey, C., & Hawkins, R. BUCLD 50, Boston.

The role of contrast in category learning

Altenhof, A. & Lupyan, G. CogSci 2025, San Francisco.

2024

The emergence of non-absolute synonymy

Altenhof, A. & Roberts, G. EVOLANG 15, Madison.

2022

Quality not quantity in synonymy avoidance

Altenhof, A. & Roberts, G. JCoLE 2022, Kanazawa.

A natural order for adpositions?

Altenhof, A., Kazaka, S., Chen, S., Peiyuan, L., Tabachnikoff, P., Zhou, R., & Kirby, S. LELPGC 28, Edinburgh.

Adults regularize unpredictable variation when variants resemble possible speech errors

Chen, Y., Altenhof, A., & Schuler, K. 96th Annual Meeting of the LSA.

2019

The role of labels in the categorization of novel objects

Altenhof, A., McGrath, M., & Roberts, G. Fourth Annual Berkeley Undergraduate Linguistics Symposium.

Posters

2026

Finding the conceptual glue: Ad-hoc categorization in people and LLMs

Altenhof, A.*, Breeden, K.*, & Lupyan, G. CogSci 2026, Rio de Janeiro.

Making room for new words

Bergey, C.*, Altenhof, A.*, & Hawkins, R. CogSci 2026, Rio de Janeiro.

Semantics in action: Nameability predicts verb extension

Flanigan, E., Altenhof, A., & Lupyan, G. CogSci 2026, Rio de Janeiro.

2023

A weak bias against strong synonymy

Altenhof, A. CogSci 2023, Sydney.

2021

Labels, even arbitrary ones, facilitate categorization

Altenhof, A. & Roberts, G. CogSci 2021, Vienna.

* Equal contribution

Teaching

Teaching Assistant

Fall 2025 – Fall 2026

PSYCH 210: Basic Statistics for Psychology

University of Wisconsin–Madison

Guest Lectures

Fall 2025

PSYCH 601: Psychology of Language

University of Wisconsin–Madison

Spring 2024

LING 213: Language Emergence

University of Wisconsin–Madison