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.
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POST DOCS AND STAFF
Monica Do
Post Doc, UPenn
Co-advised with John Trueswell
Monica received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California in May 2018. Her work on language production investigates how speakers generate a conceptual representation of what they want to talk about and how they turn that abstract message into a linguistic representation.
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.
Dionysia Saratsli
4th Year, UD
Linguistics & Cognitive Science
Dionysia is interested in psycholinguistics, pragmatics, the neurobiology of language and language disorders.
Catherine Richards
2nd Year, UD
Psychological & Brain Sciences
Katie is joining from the University of Minnesota where she studied sentence-level processing and grammatical gender's impact on categorization.
Bryce Lamers
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
Megan Kelly
UD Senior
Cognitive Science
UD Senior
Cognitive Science