People

IGERT-Affiliated LCS Faculty
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

  • Christine Massey (IRCS),
  • Laurel Sweeney, Administrative Coordinator,

For IGERT Students

IGERT-Affiliated Departments

*Computer and Information Science
**Center for Cognitive Neuroscience



Institute for Research in Cognitive Science • 3401 Walnut Street • Suite 400A
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6228 • Tel (215) 898-0357 • Fax (215) 573-9247
Questions? Comments? Please e-mail igertinfo@ircs.upenn.edu