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.

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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. 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 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. 

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POST DOCS AND STAFF

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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. 

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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.

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Tyler Knowlton

Post Doc, UPenn

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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Ariel Mathis

Lab Coordinator, UPenn

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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.

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GRADUATE STUDENTS

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Ugurcan Vurgun

2nd 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.

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June Choe

1st Year, UPenn

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.

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Karen Li

1st Year, UPenn

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. 

Dionysia Saratsli
Alyssa Kampa

5th Year, UD

Linguistics & Cognitive Science

Dionysia is interested in psycholinguistics, pragmatics, the neurobiology of language and language disorders.

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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.

UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

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Tess Christensen

UPenn Junior

Linguistics, Computer Science

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Cynthia Gu

UPenn Junior

Cognitive Science, Linguistics