LCS Director
John Trueswell
(215) 898-0911
IGERT Graduate Trainees and Associates
(in alphabetical order by last name)
Elika Bergelson is a 1st year graduate student in Psychology at
the University of Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. from New
York University in 2007. At NYU she worked with Dr. Gary Marcus
on infant rule-learning, and double majored in Language&Mind,
and Music. She then received a one-year research fellowship
in the linguistics department at the University of Maryland.
While there, she worked on Artificial Language Learning of
phonological rules with Dr. Jeff Lidz and Dr. Bill Idsardi,
as well as various MEG projects with Dr. Idsardi and Dr.
David Poeppel. She is currently working with Dr. Daniel Swingley,
focusing on how infants learn semantic categories. She is curious
about how and when infants fill in the meaning of the word-forms
they hear in daily life.
Shermin de Silva has been a graduate student in Biology at the University of Pennsylvania since 2004.
She attended University of California, Berkeley, from 1998 to 2002 and received a Bachelor of Arts Degree
in Integrative Biology and Philosophy. She conducts comparative theoretical and field research and her experience
includes studying vocalizations of spotted hyenas, and caching behavior in fox squirrels. She is currently studying
social organization and acoustic communication of free-ranging Asian elephants in Sri Lanka. Her interests include animal behavior,
communication and cognition.
Sarah Drucker
is a graduate student in the Department of Psychology.
She has a BA in Linguistics and Cognitive Science and a MA in
Psychology, also from Penn. Her research interests are primarily in
spoken language processing. Most recently, she has been studying how
interpretations of words and speech sounds persist or decay in memory
over time.
Josef Fruehwald is a first year in the Linguistics department at the University of Pennsylvania.
He graduated in 2007 with his BA in Linguistics, also from UPenn. His interests for primary research
areas are sociolinguistics and variation and change. Based on his work in these areas, he also has research
interests in phonology, phonetics, phonological and phonetic representation, language transmission and acquisition,
and speech perception.
Jennifer Gillenwater is a first year graduate student in Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
She graduated from Rice University in 2008 with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering.
Her research interests include natural language processing and machine learning.
She also did some undergraduate research work in programming languages and compressive sensing.
Other interests include creative writing, machine translation, and speech recognition.
As a first year student at Penn, she has worked on dependency parsing and screenplay-to-plot-summary alignment.
Kyle Gorman
is a 4th year student in linguistics. He earned his B.A. in
linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in
2006, and also held an internship with Kevin Knight at USC's
Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey in 2008. His research
interests include phonology and morphology, variation and change,
psycholinguistics, "decipherment" techniques in NLP and quantitative
methods in linguistics.
Hila Katz has been a graduate student in UPenn's psychology department since Fall 2008. She graduated summa cum laude from
Columbia University with a BA in psychology. She is interested in language development, particularly
children’s use of linguistic and extralinguistic cues in comprehending and producing language, and children’s
developing abilities to interpret and use metaphor, irony, and verbal humor. Her current work involves children’s
interpretations of the definite and indefinite reference.
Constantine Lignos is a
second-year graduate student in Computer Science. He graduated from Yale University in 2006 with a B.A. in Computer Science
and Psychology. His current research focuses on computational models of language acquisition, non-statistical approaches
to NLP tasks, and the nature of sparsity in language data. Before coming to Penn, he worked on automotive speech
recognition applications as part of the Microsoft Auto team.
Emily Pitler
Emily Pitler is a second-year graduate student in Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
She graduated from Yale University in 2007 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer
Science. Her research interests include computational linguistics and machine learning.
Specifically, she is interested in predicting text quality using linguistic factors
including syntax and discourse relations, and automatically identifying discourse relations.
She is interested in both evaluating human-written texts for readability and using readability
measures to improve machine-generated text.
Carolyn Quam
is a sixth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology. She received her BA from Stanford University in
2004 with departmental honors in Psychology and a minor in Music. Her research interests include word learning,
acquisition of phonological structure, and the interaction between the two. Her dissertation research focuses
on acquisition of prosodic structure, asking how children, faced with highly variable acoustic input, converge
on the correct interpretations of speech. How do they learn to assign clearly discriminable phonetic variation
to the appropriate levels of linguistic structure? She addresses these questions through experiments with infants,
toddlers, and preschoolers, and--in her IGERT interdisciplinary project with Dr. Jiahong Yuan in Linguistics--using
corpus phonetics.
Neville Ryant is a fourth-year PhD student
in the Department of Linguistics. He also graduated from Penn with a BA in Linguistics in 2005. Currently,
he is exploring the areas of mathematical linguistics and neurolinguistics and how they intersect
with basic questions in theoretical syntax/semantics. He also has secondary interests in linguistic metatheory
and gramamar construction.
LCS Administrative Staff
For IGERT Students
IGERT-Affiliated Departments
Institute for Research in Cognitive Science • 3401 Walnut Street • Suite 400A