LAB DIRECTOR
Anna Papafragou is 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 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.
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 currently the 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.
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POST DOCS AND STAFF
Sami Yousif
MindCORE Post Doc
Sami received his PhD in Psychology from Yale University. His primary research interest is spatial cognition -- how we perceive, interact with, and represent the spatial world around us. But in his free time, he works on a broad range of topics across cognitive science, including how people evaluate social testimony, how people think about the purposes and mechanisms of things, whether people are 'intuitively theistic', how people represent events, how they represent agency in language, and more. Chances are that if you are interested in any aspect of cognitive science, you'll have some overlapping interest with Sami!
Martin Ho Kwan Ip
MindCORE PostDoc
ILST Initiative
Martin received his PhD in Psychology at the MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University. He is interested in understanding how speech processing can be shaped by both language-universal mechanisms and our experience with our native language. At the Language and Cognition Lab, Martin's research examines different aspects of speech (e.g., foreign accents, prosody) and their social implications from both a cross-linguistic and a developmental perspective.
Sarah Lee
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!
Tyler Knowlton
MindCORE Post Doc
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?
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Andrea Beltrama
MindCORE Post Doc
Andrea earned his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago and held postdoctoral positions at the University of Konstanz and at the Université of Paris 7. His work investigates how the semantic, pragmatic and social dimensions of meaning contribute to determining the content conveyed by linguistic utterances in communication. He pursues this goal through the lens of various linguistic phenomena, including intensification, descriptive (im)precision, subjectivity, discourse markers and alternative-based reasoning.
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
Yiran Chen
5th Year
Linguistics
Yiran is a 5th year Ph.D. student in the Department of Linguistics. She is interested in language acquisition as well as language-cognition interface. Before joining UPenn, she earned her B.S. in Child Studies and Psychology at Vanderbilt University, where she also majored in French and minored in Piano performance. Outside of research, Yiran enjoys making music and food.
Karen Li
2nd Year
Linguistics
Karen’s interests lie mainly in the realm of semantics and pragmatics, and extend to the related fields of psycholinguistics and discourse analysis. She earned her B.A. in Linguistics, Math, and Cognitive Science from Rutgers University, where she explored the use of Mandarin sentence final particles as tools of discourse management. Drawing from her mathematical background, Karen also enjoys formal and computational methods of approaching linguistics.
Ugurcan Vurgun
5th Year
Linguistics
Following some time in the industry, Ugurcan received his Master's degree in Linguistics from Bogazici University in Turkey, where he studied the syntax of focus particles in Turkish. He is now a Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is interested in event cognition. Outside of research, he enjoys reading about astronomy and spending time with his kids.
June Choe
4th Year
Linguistics
June is interested in psycholinguistics and the mechanisms of ambiguity resolution in particular. He earned his B.A. in Linguistics at Northwestern University, where he researched syntactic and semantic reanalysis in garden-path sentences. Outside of linguistics, June is an R enthusiast and enjoys blogging about data visualization.
Sophie Faircloth
Senior & M.A. student
Linguistics
Sophie is currently pursuing Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Linguistics with a concentration in pragmatics. She is interested in the intersection of sociolinguistics and pragmatics, currently researching the impact of socio-indexical information on the evaluation of socially impactful pragmatic behavior such as sarcasm usage and underinformativeness. Outside of school, she enjoys playing the drums, painting, and performing in UPenn’s musical comedy group, Mask and Wig.
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
Tess Christensen
Cynthia Gu
Laura Avilés
Senior
Linguistics, Computer Science
Tess is a first-year Master's in Education student at Penn's Graduate School of Education studying Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). She also attended Penn for undergrad, majoring in Linguistics and Cognitive Science. Tess is interested in the application of language acquisition research to foreign and second language education. In her spare time, she also enjoys running, rock climbing, and playing Dungeons & Dragons.
Senior
Cognitive Science, Linguistics
Cynthia is pursuing a double major in cognitive science and linguistics and a minor in design. She is interested in the intersection of language and cognition — particularly, language acquisition and bilingualism. Outside of school, she enjoys crocheting and brewing coffee.
Sophomore
Linguistics
Laura is a sophomore from Puerto Rico studying in the College. She is majoring in Linguistics. Her main interests include bilingualism, specifically rules governing code switching between Spanish and English, language acquisition and sociolinguistics. She is interested in combining her knowledge of languages with healthcare. In her spare time she enjoys horseback riding and analyzing movies.
Jamie Yuen
Junior
Psychology
Jamie is studying psychology in the College. She is interested in psycholinguistics with an emphasis in second language acquisition and bilingualism. In her free time, she enjoys journaling, baking, and going to concerts.
Olivia Maltz
Junior
Cognitive Science
Olivia Maltz is a junior from Philadelphia. She is earning her B.A. majoring in Cognitive Science with a concentration in Computation and Cognition and minoring in Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include language acquisition in early childhood and computational linguistics. She is excited to further explore her interests in Computer Science and Early Childhood Education.