News Archive

Congratulations, Dr. Nguyen!

an nguyen

An Nguyen finished her PhD this spring, defending her dissertation on “Acquiring Syntactic Variation : Regularization in Wh-Question Production.”

Best Paper Award in Language Acquisition Journal

an nguyen

An Nguyen is first author of “The acquisition of wh-questions: Beyond structural economy and input frequency,” written with advisor Prof. Geraldine Legendre. This paper was selected by the Language Acquisition editorial team as the 2022 best paper by an untenured scientist. An’s paper looks at factors that influence children’s comprehension and production of different syntactic variants. Any paper whose...

Congratulations, Dr. Lutken!

jane lutken

Jane Lutken finished her PhD this year and is starting as a Postdoctoral Associate in the Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. [...]

Upcoming presentations

Talk Oct 22, 2020: An Nguyen giving a talk at the Many Paths to Language workshop, hosted by the Max Planck Institute: Testing syntactic simplicity: wh-in-situ vs. fronted wh-questions in L1 acquisition Nov 13, 2020: An Nguyen giving a Brown Bag Lunch talk: The acquisition of wh-questions: Beyond structural simplicity and input frequency January 8,...

New MA student and undergraduate RA

This Fall 2020, the Language Acquisition Lab welcomes new MA student Renee Cong and new undergraduate Jasmin Thames. Renee holds a BA in Cognitive Science from Berkeley. Her research interests include language acquisition, bilingualism, and second language acquisition. Jasmin Thames is a 3rd-year Cognitive Science, Linguistics minor undergraduate. Her research interests include psycholinguistics, bilingualism, language...

Science of Learning Fellowship Awardee

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PhD student An Nguyen was awarded a two-year Science of Learning Fellowship. Congrats! The Science of Learning Institute (SLI) at Johns Hopkins is funding three such graduate fellowships, one in each the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Department of Cognitive Science, and the Mind/Brain Institute. The fellowships reward these graduate research programs for their multidisciplinary approaches to learning...

Jane Lutken returns from University of Konstanz

jane lutken

Jane Lutken has recently returned from Germany where she conducted research at the University of Konstanz in cooperation with Professor Bettina Braun at the “BabySpeechLab”. Research there is ongoing, thanks to the help of Research Assistants Carina Haase and Naomi Reichmann. This project was supported by an NSF (Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant), which she was...

Jane Lutken Receives NSF Research Grant

jane lutken

Join us in congratulating fourth year PhD student Jane Lutken for receiving an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Award to pursue her research project on “Cross-Linguistic Investigations of Syntactic Creativity Errors in Children’s Wh-questions” in Germany next year. Being awarded such a grant on the first attempt is rare! Jane’s project will investigate children’s errors during production and comprehension of questions with...

New MA & PhD Students

The Language Acquisition Lab would like to welcome new MA student Victoria Cheng and new PhD student An Nguyen. Victoria earned her undergraduate degree in computer science at UCSD. Her research interests include first and second language acquisition, cognitive basis for language learning and processing, and bilingualism. An graduated from Truman State University in 2017...

Summer Research Assistant

This summer, the lab welcomes rising junior Laura Nugent as a new RA, investigating comparisons between Hungarian and American children’s questions. Laura’s interests include first and second language acquisition,   bilingualism, theoretical syntax, and neurolinguistics.