Principal Investigators
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
Lila Gleitman
It is with profound sadness to report that Professor Lila Gleitman passed away August 8, 2021, at age 91. Lila was a leader in the developing field of cognitive science, and a guiding light to many in the field both personally and professionally. Please visit here and here for information on her life well lived.
Lab Manager
Abimael Hernandez Jimenez
Abimael is the current lab manager of the Language Learning Lab. He graduated with a B.A. in Psychology and Language Science from the University of California, Irvine in June 2020. He has conducted research on children’s understanding of temporal and event semantics and adult scope-ambiguity resolution in Mandarin, Spanish, and English.
Personal website | abimaelh at upenn dot edu
Graduate Students
Victor Gomes
Victor is a second-year graduate student. He graduated from Swarthmore College in 2017 with a B.A. in cognitive science and psychology. He is interested pragmatics, expressives, negation, and how we learn the meaning of logical operators (e.g., and, or, not) more broadly. He is passionate about outreach and education, and enjoys reading about narratology and comparative mythology, but in a cool way. He is also the program coordinator for out4STEM, an afterschool program for LGBT+ teens interested in science, at the Mütter Museum.
Personal website | vgomes at upenn dot edu
Postdoctoral Researchers
Sandy LaTourrette
Sandy is a postdoctoral fellow. He received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Northwestern University in 2020. 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. By studying these questions from infancy into adulthood, this research provides insight into the interaction of cognitive development and language acquisition. Outside the lab, Sandy enjoys hiking, musicals, fantasy novels, and Scottish country dancing.
Personal website | alatour at upenn dot edu
Martin Ho Kwan Ip
Martin is a postdoctoral fellow. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the MARCS Institute in December 2019. He is interested in how speech processing can be shaped by both language-universal mechanisms and our experience with our native language. At the Language Learning Lab, Martin studies (1) how infants and young children use cues from prosodic focus to learn and remember words and their contextual alternatives, and (2) how adult speakers across languages prioritize different information structural and phrasing cues in sentence disambiguation.
Personal website | mhkip at sas dot upenn dot edu
Tyler Knowlton
Tyler 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 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
Visiting Scholars
Clara Dargent
Clara is a visiting student from the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) where she is pursuing her Master’s degree in Cognitive Neuroscience. With a bachelor in Experimental Sciences that she obtained from PSL University, she is interested in understanding the intricate processes that underlie language acquisition, with a particular focus on sign language modality. In addition to her work in Psycholinguistics, Clara is passionate about the neuro-markers of emotional memory in certain disorders like PTSD.
Undergraduate Research Assistants
- Luna Chen
- Allie Fehr
- Ruoheng Cheng
Collaborators
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
Monica Do
Monica is a postdoctoral fellow. She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on the extent to which the language processing system relies on syntactic representations, especially in situations when building those representations can be challenging. In the domain of comprehension, this means she investigates the processing of deprecated or ‘ungrammatical’ sentences. In language production, she investigates the role of syntax in the transition from abstract concepts to linguistic representations.
Alon Hafri
Alon Hafri is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Departments of Cognitive Science and Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. Alon works with Mick Bonner and Chaz Firestone, as well as Barbara Landau, on force-dynamic relations (“in” and “on”). He uses psychophysical, computational modeling, and fMRI techniques to identify how our perceptual and cognitive systems extract these relations from scenes. (Did you know that a phone in a basket looks remarkably similar to a knife in a cup?).
Anna Papafragou
Anna is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from University College London in 1998. Her main interests lie in language acquisition (especially semantics and pragmatics) and the interface between linguistic and non-linguistic representations in adults and children.
Charles Yang
Charles is an associate professor in the departments of Linguistics, Computer Science, and Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2000. His research interests include language acquisition, processing, and change; morphology and the mental lexicon, computational linguistics, and the evolution of language and cognition.
Spencer Caplan
Spencer is a Ph.D student in the Linguistics Department at Penn, and received his B.A. in linguistics and computer science from Brown University. His research lies at the intersection of computation, cognition, and theoretical linguistics with a focus on language acquisition. His recent work in the lab includes computational modeling of word learning and its influence on the lexicon. Outside of academia, Spencer is heavily involved in competitive Ballroom dancing.
Personal website | spcaplan at upenn dot edu