LAB DIRECTOR
Anna Papafragou is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently the Director of the interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Language and Communication Sciences, the Associate Director of Research at Penn’s MindCORE Center for Outreach, Research, and Education, and a member of the Psychology Graduate Group at Penn. Anna received her B.A. in Linguistics with highest honors from the University of Athens and her Ph.D. in Linguistics from University College London. She received postdoctoral training at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania (where she worked with Lila Gleitman at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science). She previously served on the faculty in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Delaware with a joint appointment in the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science.
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Anna has published over 85 articles and chapters and has given over 100 invited talks on how children acquire meanings in language, how language is used and understood, and how language interfaces with human perception and cognition. Her work has been supported by multiple grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Anna is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and a recipient of the Young Scholars Award of the Francis Alison Society, one of the highest awards for faculty at UD. She regularly teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on experimental semantics and pragmatics, language acquisition, and the relationship between language and thought. Anna is committed to promoting the cognitive science of language through interdisciplinary research, student training, community outreach, and various professional roles. She is the past President of the Cognitive Science Society and serves on the U.S. National Committee for Psychological Science/International Union of Psychological Science at the National Academy of Sciences. She is a lifetime member of the Linguistic Society of America, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Philosophy and Psychology.
POST DOCS AND STAFF
Sarah Lee
Visiting Post Doc
Sarah received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California. She uses various experimental methods to examine event representations in language and the mind. How are events represented in the mind? How do mental representations of events relate to linguistic representations of events? Currently, she is specifically interested in the internal temporal structure/complexity of events. She also has broader interests that revolve around meaning and its interfaces - specific topics include evidentiality, subjectivity, comparison classes, and more!
Madison Paron
Lab Manager
Madison earned her B.A. in Cognitive Sciences from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. She is interested in neurolingistics, specifically evaluating the processes underlying the acquisition of verbal and signed languages. Outside of research, Madison enjoys skiing and spending time with her family.
GRADUATE STUDENTS
Jonathan Him Nok Lee
4th Year
Linguistics
Jonathan is interested in prosody (broadly construed) and its intersections with language acquisition, bilingualism, psychotherapy process, and social cognition. Prior to his study at Penn, he was based at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he earned his M.Phil. and B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature, with double minors in French and Philosophy, and worked at the Digital Signal Processing & Speech Technology Lab.
Emily Pecsok
2nd Year
Linguistics
Emily is interested in meaning, specifically subjectivity and adaptation of vague predicate interpretations. Her primary work is in experimental Semantics and Pragmatics. She earned her B.A. in Linguistics and Applied Math at Cornell University, where she studied the impacts of faultless disagreement on semantic representations. When not in the lab, Emily enjoys working with horses and hiking.
Ruidi Huang
2nd Year
Linguistics
Ruidi earned her B.A. in English and M.A. in Foreign Languages and Literatures from Tsinghua University. Her research focuses on the mechanisms for child language acquisition. She is currently interested in the conceptual development of children and its intertwined relationship with language and its development. She is also open to everything involving human cognition!
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
Sierra Williams
Junior
Cultural & Linguistic Anthropology and Linguistics
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Sierra is a junior double majoring in Cultural & Linguistic Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in how people use language to construct meaning, identity, and belonging across different cultural contexts. Her research interests include semantics, pragmatics, multilingualism, and the relationship between language, cognition, and culture. Outside of linguistics, Sierra is passionate about cultural heritage, museum ethics, and the anthropology of communication. In her free time, she enjoys reading, writing, and exploring art, music, and global cultures.
Abril Herrera-Calderon
Freshman
Cognitive Science​
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Abril is a freshman and prospective Cognitive Science major with a concentration in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. She is especially interested in neurolinguistics and the relationship between the brain, mind, and behavior. She has a strong interest in working with children. In her free time, she loves running on trails, attending concerts, playing around with Google Translate, and catching up on her favorite TV series.
Riya Patil
Sophomore
Neuroscience
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Riya is a sophomore and prospective Neuroscience major at the University of Pennsylvania. Her interests include neurolinguistics, multilingualism, the relationship between language and the mind, and computational linguistics. In her free time, she enjoys badminton, running, playing violin, and learning languages.