Principal Investigator
Department of Linguistics
University of Pennsylvania
Marlyse Baptista, PhD
Marlyse is a President’s Distinguished Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a contact linguist and morphosyntactician specialized in Pidgin and Creole languages (and their source languages), and in theories of language emergence, language contact and change. She uses experimental methods to investigated how languages and their speakers converge, diverge and innovate in multilingual settings. She also uses fieldwork data and tools from Generative Syntax to study the grammatical properties of Pidgins and Creoles.
Current members
Department of Linguistics
University of Pennsylvania
Yourdanis Sedarous, PhD
Yourdanis is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Language Contact and Cognition lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research investigates the extent to which bilingual speakers’ cognitive representations of the syntactic structures of their two languages are interconnected.
Department of Linguistics
San Diego State University
Alicia Stevers, PhD
Alicia Stevers is a lecturer in Linguistics at San Diego State University. She completed her PhD at the University of Michigan in 2020. Her work focuses on corpus and experimental methods to test pragmatic and sociopragmatic questions, specifically around determiner constructions and notions of givenness. In her spare time, she enjoys sewing, baking, and spending time with her husband, Dan and their two little boys, Emmett and Sunny.
Department of Linguistics
University of Pennsylvania
Le Xuan Chan
Le Xuan is a graduate student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests focus on phonetics, multilingualism, and variation.
Department of Linguistics
Boston University
Ousmane Cisse
Ousmane is a graduate student in the Department of Linguistics at Boston University. His research interests focus on syntax, the interaction between syntax and morphology, sociolinguistics, and Mandinka language documentation.
Department of Linguistics
University of Pennsylvania
Quynh-Giang Dang
Giang is a graduate student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania advised by Julie Legate and Marlyse Baptista. She is broadly interested in the syntax of understudied languages, educational linguistics and postcolonial studies. Her recent research in linguistics involves Vietnamese syntax in the context of East/Southeast Asia and a critical examination of language education policies in Vietnam. Giang is also pursuing a Graduate Certificate in French and Francophone Studies, focusing on Vietnamese diaspora literature through a postcolonial lens.
Department of Linguistics
University of Pennsylvania
Jahnai Garner
Jahnai is a graduate student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests focus on psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics.
Department of Linguistics
University of Pennsylvania
Pristina Koon
Pristina is a graduate student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania advised by Marlyse Baptista and David Embick. Her research focuses on how morphology is represented and processed in the grammars of bilinguals, and, more broadly, what happens when morphological systems come into contact. She works primarily with Indonesian-English bilinguals.
Department of Linguistics
University of Pennsylvania
Wesley Lincoln
Wesley is a graduate student in Linguistics advised by Gareth Roberts and Meredith Tamminga. His research is centered around variation and contact phenomena in the languages of his native Singapore. He is interested in both phonetic and morphosyntactic variation.
Department of Linguistics
University of Pennsylvania
Mikaela Belle Martin
Mikaela is a graduate student in Linguistics advised by Meredith Tamminga and Florian Schwarz. Their research interests include sociolinguistics, semantics, and psycholinguistics. Mikaela’s research broadly focuses on the shared roots of African American English and Gullah and as well as the psycho-social underpinnings of language, group membership, social evaluation, and pragmatic processing.
Departments of Psychology and Linguistics
University of Pennsylvania
Chenxu (“Tommy”) Zhang
Tommy is an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, double majoring in linguistics and psychology. His research interests are centered at bi-/multilingualism and psycholinguistics, with additional interests in sociolinguistics, syntax, and semantics.
Alumni
Department of English Language and Literature
Gyeongsang National University
Soo-Hwan Lee, PhD (2024-2025)
Soo-Hwan is a former post-doctoral fellow in the Language Contact and Cognition lab at the University of Pennsylvania. He completed his PhD at New York University in 2024. His research primarily focuses on syntax and morphology. One of his ongoing projects focuses on how nominal arguments are represented and licensed in syntax. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Literature at Gyeongsang National University.
Sarah DiPietra
Sarah is a former undergraduate researched in the Language Contact and Cognition lab at the University of Pennsylvania. As part of her Senior thesis project in Linguistics with Marlyse Baptista, she focused on language change, language use, and language attitudes towards preserved archaic Italian dialects in the northeastern United States.