People | langcoglab

LAB DIRECTOR

Anna Papafragou is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. 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 75 articles and chapters and has given over 95 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. In 2007, she received the Young Scholars Award of the Francis Alison Society, the highest award for an Assistant Professor 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 currently serves on the Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society and 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.

CV Email

POST DOCS AND STAFF

Andrea Beltrama

Post Doc, UPenn

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.

Martin Ho Kwan Ip

Post Doc, UPenn

MindCORE - 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.

Ariel Mathis

Lab Coordinator, UPenn

Ariel holds Master's degrees from the University of Delaware and the University of Memphis. She is interested in event cognition and monolingual and bilingual language processing.

GRADUATE STUDENTS

Ugurcan Vurgun

1st Year, UPenn

Linguistics

Following a ten-year period working in the consumer goods sector, 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. student in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is interested in language processing and psycholinguistics.

Yue Ji

Ph.D. Candidate, UD

Linguistics & Cognitive Science

Yue is interested in the connection between language and cognition in event representation. She is currently working on how viewers access abstract event structure.

Alyssa Kampa

Ph.D. Candidate, UD

Linguistics & Cognitive Science

Alyssa is interested in pragmatic and epistemological development. She is currently studying scalar implicature derivation in linguistic and non-linguistic communication.