LCS Director
John Trueswell
(215) 898-0911
IGERT Graduate Trainees and Associates
(in alphabetical order by last name)
Chris Ahern is a graduate student in the Linguistics Department. He
graduated from Northwestern University in 2008 with a BA in Linguistics. His research focuses on meaning. Previously, he has investigated the impact of extra-linguistic factors, such as typicality, on definite reference. He is currently interested in the use of game theory in characterizing vague expressions like 'red' and 'tall', and how this can be incorporated into broader theories of meaning.
Elika Bergelson is a graduate student in Psychology at UPenn. Elika
received her B.A. from NYU in 2007 where she worked with Dr. Gary Marcus
on infant rule-learning in music and language. She then undertook a
one-year research fellowship at the University of Maryland where she
worked on infant behavioral studies and adult MEG studies with Drs. Bill
Idsardi, Jeff Lidz, and David Poeppel. She currently works with Dr.
Daniel Swingley, focusing on how infants learn the meanings of their
very first words. This work uses eye-tracking to look at infants' word
comprehension from 6-18 months, with the goal of uncovering the timeline
and mechanisms involved in infants developing ability to link words with
their world.
Christine Boylan
is a first-year graduate student in Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She graduated from the University of Chicago in 2008 with BA degrees in linguistics and biology (latter specializing in neuroscience). From 2008 to 2010 she worked at NYU.s Neurolinguistics Laboratory, where she conducted simultaneous MEG+EEG studies on syntactic/semantic processing. Her current research aim is to use fMRI pattern analysis techniques to study syntactic and semantic categorization and prediction effects. Her general interests include the neural bases of language comprehension, the syntax/semantics interface, and lexical access vs. composition mechanisms.
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.
Aaron Ecay is a first-year graduate student in Penn's linguistics program. His primary research interest is in the field of historical syntax. Specifically, he is interested in investigating how diachronic patterns of language use can answer questions about the architecture of synchronic grammar. Aaron is also interested in the refinement of statistical methods as applied to linguistic data and syntactic questions more generally.
Josef Fruehwald is a third year student in the Linguistics department at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated in 2007 with his BA in Linguistics, also from UPenn. His primary research interests are sociolinguistics and variation and change. He also has research interests in phonology, phonetics, phonological and phonetic representation, language transmission and acquisition, speech perception, and quantitative approaches for language research.
Andy Gersick is a third-year graduate student studying animal cognition and communication in Penn's Psychology program. He received his B.A. in History from Yale University in 1996, and worked for several years as an education researcher and curriculum designer at the Center for Children and Technology, a progressive education-technology research-and-development organization, before deciding to pursue a longstanding interest in ethology. He now works with Dr. David White and Drs. Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth in Penn’s Animal Behavior Group, where his area of focus is social communication in group-living animals. Through a partnership with Michigan State University's Zoology Department, he is currently conducting his doctoral research in the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, studying vocal communication in spotted hyenas under the auspices of Dr. Kay Holekamp's Mara Hyena Project.
Jennifer Gillenwater is a third 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 general research interests are natural language
processing and machine learning. Over the past two years she has worked
with Professor Ben Taskar on dependency parsing with posterior
regularization, screenplay-to-summary alignment, and speaker diarization
in TV episodes.
Kyle Gorman
is a 5th year student in linguistics. He earned a BA 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 concerns phonology and morphology, language variation, natural language processing, and quantitive 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 particularly interested in the role of
various linguistic and extralinguistic factors and discourse constraints
in children’s and adults' comprehension and production of referential
expressions; her interests also include how children and adults interpret definite reference, determiners, and quantifiers.
Constantine Lignos
Constantine Lignos is a third-year graduate student in Computer Science.
He graduated from Yale University in 2006 with a B.A. in Computer
Science and Psychology. His research focuses on computational models of
language acquisition and cognitively-plausible and
developmentally-motivated approaches to language processing. Before
coming to Penn, he worked on automotive speech recognition applications
as part of the Microsoft Auto team.
Sarah Maguire is a second year biology graduate student pursuing her doctoral thesis in Amita Seghal's lab. While at PENN, she plans to study the molecular genetics of inherited sleep and circandian rhythm patterns in the fruit fly. Sarah also has strong interests in the neurobiology of vocal communication in songbirds and hopes to apply her work from Seghal lab to understand more about how the song system evolved.
Emily Pitler is a fourth-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
general research interest is natural language processing. She works
on topics in automatic discourse analysis and summarization with
Professor Ani Nenkova.
Maria Rakhovskaya is a 5th year Ph.D. student in biology. After
receiving her B.Sc. with honors in zoology and B.A. in history and Spanish literature from the University of Maryland,
she studied bioacoustics and neuroethology at the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development.
Areas of current interest include behavioral ecology, animal communication, and comparative psychology and physiology.
Her Ph.D. project focuses on the relationship between social behavior and hormone levels in free-ranging monkeys.
Carlos Santana is a first-year student in philosophy. He graduated with a BA in philosophy from Brigham Young University in 2010. His general research interests are in linguistically-informed philosophy of mind.
Adrienne Scutellaro is a graduate student in the Psychology department
at the University of Pennsylvania. Her BA in English was completed at
the College of New Jersey in 2005 and she received her Ed.M from the
Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2007. She then spent two years
as the research coordinator for the Language Lab in the UCLA department
of Linguistics, where she conducted research on infant categorization of
speech sounds and grammatical development through early childhood. Her
current research interests are aimed at finding out how phonological development proceeds in early second language learners.
Kobey Shwayder is a graduate student in the Linguistics department. He graduated from Harvard with a BA in
Linguistics in 2007, and received an MA from Brandeis University in Computational Linguistics in 2009. He is
interested in phonology and morphology and the interaction of the two. Other interests include the algorithmic
modeling of phonological processes and accounting for the capability for variation in individual speakers.
LCS Administrative Staff
Institute for Research in Cognitive Science • 3401 Walnut Street • Suite 400A