JOHN TRUESWELL

Professor John Trueswell is a psycholinguist who studies language acquisition and language processing. Some of the fundamental questions that Professor Trueswell is interested in include: How do humans so effortlessly interpret utterances in real-time, using incoming speech to compute a speaker’s intended meaning? How do young children learn the meanings of words, and interpret syntactic structure? How do the processing demands of real-time interpretation influence language acquisition, and possibly shape the languages of the world? And conversely, does the language we speak change how we see and think about the world?

Personal website | johntrueswell at gmail dot com

Junyi (April) Chen

April graduated from Cornell University in 2024 with a B.A. in Psychology. During her time as an undergraduate, she was a research assistant in the Cognitive Science of Language Lab. Her research interests focus on how children and adults acquire both their first and second languages. She is also interested in how first and second languages shape language learning and processing.

aprchen at sas dot upenn dot edu

Abigail Laver

Abby is a first-year graduate student. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021 with a B.A. in Psychology. Her research investigates how children can use the first few words they’ve acquired to learn syntax and additional word meanings. She also does work on whether children have an abstract representation of symmetry that is shared between vision and language. In her free time, Abby enjoys reading, seeing the ballet and musicals, hiking, and spending time with friends and her dog.

alaver at sas dot upenn dot edu

Tyler Knowlton

Tyler is a postdoctoral fellow. He earned his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Maryland and his BA in Cognitive Science from Johns Hopkins. His research focuses on the meanings of logical expressions like “every” and “most” and asks: What do their mental representations look like? How do the formal details of those representations affect non-linguistic cognitive systems? And what leads children to connect those particular representations with the relevant pronunciations?

Personal website | tzknowlt at sas dot upenn dot edu

Zoe Ovans

Zoe is a postdoctoral fellow. She received her Ph.D in Neuroscience & Cognitive Science from the University of Maryland and her BA in Cognitive Science and English from Johns Hopkins University. She is interested in how sentence processing interacts with extralinguistic systems, such as executive function and spatial processing. Her doctoral work focused on how our cognitive control system interacts with real-time sentence processing during development, and her postdoctoral work investigates how sentence processing interacts with spatial reasoning, as well as how children learn words and structures that express symmetrical relations.

zovans at upenn dot edu

Lena Abirou

2024 Mindcore Summer Fellowship

Language(s) spoken: Arabic (native) & English (native) & French (fluent)

Education: Cognitive Science & Linguistic

Expected Year of Graduation: 2026

Emily Bornstein

Research Assistant

Language(s) spoken: English (native) & Hebrew

Education: English major with minors in Psychology and Cognitive Science

Expected Year of Graduation: 2025

Yiran Chen

Yiran received my PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2023, and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Infant Learning Lab at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Her research investigates the acquisition of linguistic variation, cross-situational word learning, and language-event cognition interface.

Personal website | chen2537 at wisc dot edu

Sandy LaTourrette

Sandy is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Psychology at Haverford College. His research investigates how we learn words and map them to concrete individuals and abstract concepts, as well as how learning words can shape what we learn about the world.

Personal website | alatour at sas dot upenn dot edu

Alex de Carvalho

Alex is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the Université Paris Descartes and he develops his research at the Laboratoire de Psychologie du Développement et de l’Éducation de l’enfant (LaPsyDÉ – UMR CNRS 8240). He is particularly interested in identifying the mechanisms that young children can use to learn the syntax of their native language and to develop their vocabulary.

Personal website | alex dot de-carvalho at u-paris.fr

Anne Christophe

Anne is a CNRS senior researcher at Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique. Her work focuses on phrasal prosody and funciton words, showing that infants acquire these aspects of their mother tongue early.

Personal website | anne dot christophe at ens dot fr

Monica Do

Monica is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. Her research uses experiments in language production to better understand the relationship between thought and language.

Personal website | monicado at uchicago dot edu

Roman Feiman

Roman is an assistant professor in the department of Cognitive, Linguistics & Psychological Sciences at Brown University. The main questions he tries to answer at “how is it so easy for us to understand new sentences and think new thoughts, judge whether they’re true, and reason through to related thoughts and sentences?”

Personal website | roman_feiman at brown dot edu

Albert Kim

Albert is an Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research investigates how people understand language using neuroimaging and behavioral techniques.

Personal website | albert dot kim at colorado dot edu

Barbara Landau

Barbara is the Dick and Lydia Todd Professor in the department of cognitive science at Johns Hopkins University. She is interested in human knowledge of language and space, and the relationships between these two foundational systems of knowledge.

Personal website | landau at jhu dot edu

Susan Goldin-Meadow

Susan is the Beardley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the department of psychology at the University of Chicago. Her research interests are language development and creation and gesture’s role in communicating, thinking, and learning.

Personal website | sgsg at uchicago dot edu

Anna Papafragou

Anna is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Her main interests lie in language acquisition (especially semantics and pragmatics) and the interface between linguistic and non-linguistic representations in adults and children.

Personal website | anna4 at sas dot upenn dot edu

Joe Toscano

Joe is an associate professor in the department of psychological & brain sciences at Villanova University. His research investigates questions about perception and language processing.

Personal website | joseph dot toscano at villanova dot edu

Personal website | charles dot yang at ling dot upenn dot edu