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

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...

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

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 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...

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...

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.