People

Dr. John Trueswell

Dr. Trueswell is the current director of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science and the director of the IGERT Language and Communication Program. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1993 and is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Penn. Dr. Trueswell's research investigates how adults and children rapidly interpret language in real-time, as it is being perceived.

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Dr. Lila Gleitman

Dr. Gleitman received the Ph.D in Linguistics from Penn in 1967 and after some years in the Linguistics Dept. at Swarthmore has been a professor of Psychology at Penn (now emerita); she is also a Visiting Professor in Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. With A. Joshi, she was founding Director of IRCS (1980-2000). Her research concerns the mental lexicon and the syntax-semantics interface, language acquisition, and the relation between language and thought.

Dr. Ann Bunger

Ann is a postdoctoral fellow both at our lab and at the University of Delaware, where she works with Anna Papafragou (see below). She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Northwestern University. Her research focuses on the way that preschoolers describe events happening in the world around them and what this reveals about the way they understand the world. When not in the lab or driving up and down I-95, Ann is likely to be trying out new recipes or spending quality time in the mountains of Pennsylvania.

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Dr. Tamara Nicol Medina

Tamara is a postdoctoral fellow in the lab.  She found her way here via Johns Hopkins University (Ph.D. in Cognitive Science, 2007).  Her research interests include word learning, conceptual development, verb meaning and argument realization, and syntactic theory.  In 2008 she got her very own infant to study in her free time at home - they are currently working on learning new words and the occasional multi-word utterance.  In her spare moments, Tamara thinks about how she used to have time for photography and travel.

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Hila Katz, Ph.D. student

Hila, a second-year grad student in our lab, received her B.A. in psychology from Columbia University.  Her research interests, for the indefinite future, will definitely include the definite and indefinite reference, along with a healthy dose of metaphor, humor, and irony.  Outside of the lab she enjoys writing, reading, coaxing soft melodies from the piano, and taking long contemplative walks.

Aviad Eilam, Ph.D. student

Aviad is a fifth-year graduate student in the Department of Linguistics here at Penn. He received his B.A. in linguistics and psychology from Tel Aviv University in 2004. His lab-related interests include the acquisition of expletive negation and other context-sensitive items, first-generation Modern Hebrew as a case study of variable input acquisition, and the way in which children deal with parametric variation in syntax and morphology. When not in the lab, Aviad can be found in Williams Hall.

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Alon Hafri

Alon started as the lab research assistant in January 2009, and has been enjoying his time here tracking eye movements, among other tasks. He received his B.A. in music from Wesleyan University in 2007, and volunteered as an R.A. at the Temple Infant Lab from 2007-2008 until settling here at Penn. He is an avid soup-maker (ask him about French Onion) and plays music around Philly in the Josh and Pete Band.

Dr. Anna Papafragou

Anna is an associate professor in the departments of Psychology and of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Delaware. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from University College London in 1998. Her main interests lie with language acquisition (especially of semantics and pragmatics) and the interface between linguistic and non-linguistic representations in adults and children.

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Carolyn Quam, Ph.D. student

Carolyn is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. from Stanford University in 2004 with departmental honors in Psychology and a minor in Music. Her research addresses language-acquisition issues including acquisition of phonology, the application of phonological knowledge to word learning, and how regularities in the input constrain children's word-learning hypotheses.

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Sarah Johnstone Drucker, Ph.D. student

Sarah is a graduate student in the Dahan lab. She's currently studying timing and order effects in spoken language comprehension.

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Ranjani Prabhakaran, Ph.D. student

Ranjani received her Sc.B. in Neuroscience from Brown University in 2004. Her research focuses on the neural correlates of working memory, language processing, and the role of prefrontal cortex in executive functions. In particular, she is interested in the extent to which prefrontal cortex functions in a domain-general fashion across verbal and nonverbal domains. She is also interested in genetic influences on individual differences in cognitive control abilities. She is currently investigating the extent to which there is correlated variation in individual performance across cognitive control tasks in verbal and nonverbal domains.

Elika Bergelson, Ph.D. student

Elika Bergelson is a 2nd year graduate student in psychology, working under the supervision of Dan Swingley.  She is interested in how and when infants learn the meanings and semantic classes of words, and is currently investigating this through research using eyetracking. She is also involved in research at UMD with Jeff Lidz and Bill Idsardi on phonological rule learning in infants and adults.

Emily Zenger

Emily worked in the lab from 2008 to 2009, and is now working in New York City.

Katie McEldoon

Katie was the research assistant for the lab from 2006 to 2008, and is now a graduate student in the Department of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University.

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Sudha Arunachalam

Sudha received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Penn in 2008 and is now a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University.

David January

David received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Penn in 2008.

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Rebecca Nappa

Rebecca received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Penn in 2007 and is now a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University.

Youngon Choi

Youngon was a postdoctoral fellow in our lab from 2003 to 2006 and is now an assistant professor at Chung-Ang University.

Karen Mims

Karen received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Penn in 2006.

Jared Novick

Jared received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Penn in 2005, and was a research assistant in our lab, as well. He is now an assistant research scientist in the Center for Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland.

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Allison Wessel

Allison was the research assitant for the lab from 2004 to 2006.

Elsi Kaiser

Elsi received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Penn in 2003 and is now an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Southern California.

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Felicia Hurewitz

Felicia received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Penn in 2001 and is now an assistant professor in the Psychology Department at Drexel University.

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Albert Kim

Albert received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Penn in 2000 and is now an assistant professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science and the
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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Jesse Snedeker

Jesse received her Ph.D. in Psychology from penn in 1999 and was also a postdoctoral fellow in our lab from 2000 to 2001. She is now an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.

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Julien Musolino

Julien was a postdoctoral fellow in our lab from 1998 to 2001 and is now an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Rutgers University.

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Edward Kako

Edward received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Penn in 1998.

Irina Sekerina

Irina was a postdoctoral fellow in our lab from 1997 to 1999 and is now an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the College of Staten Island.

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Jennifer Arnold

Jennifer was a postdoctoral fellow in our lab from 1998 to 2000 and is now an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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