Principal Investigator
Judith Degen
Judith did her undergrad and MSc work in Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück and her PhD work in Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics at the University of Rochester. She is interested in how people construct meaning in communication. She spends her time thinking about how to characterize the interaction of linguistic information, context, and world knowledge in language production and comprehension.
Graduate students
Jiayi Lu
Jiayi did his undergraduate study in Linguistics, Neuroscience, and Integrated Sciences at Northwestern University before coming to Stanford. Jiayi is primarily interested in psycholinguistics and syntax. Specifically, he is interested in exploring the various factors that affect sentence acceptability judgments, and how experimental methods can inform syntactic theories.
Brandon Waldon
Brandon did his BA in Linguistics at the University of Chicago before spending a year as a visiting student researcher at Leibniz-ZAS Berlin. He is interested in experimental approaches to semantics and pragmatics, corpus linguistics, and philosophy of language.
Bran Papineau
Bran is a PhD student of Linguistics. Their interests include language and gender, language and music, and socio- and psycholinguistics more broadly. They also occasionally enjoy straying into morphology, and their current QP deals with English gender morphology and social ideologies. They also enjoy the language-learning side of linguistics, and have studied Spanish, Faroese, Russian, Mandarin, and Greek.
Anthony Velasquez
Tony is a PhD student in Linguistics. He is interested in sociolinguistics, especially third-wave variationist work, and the intersection between social and semantic/pragmatic meaning, as well as exploring how an understanding of language as socially and cognitively embedded can provide paths forward in modelling language behavior. His current work focuses on Bayesian modelling of the impacts of social information on semantic interpretation.
Jesús Adolfo Hermosillo
Adolfo is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics. He is interested in computational linguistics, semantics, sociolinguistics and multilingualism. He uses computational and experimental methods to answer questions about meaning and linguistic variation.
Penny Pan
Penny received her B.A. in Cognitive Science from Vassar College and is currently a master’s student in the Symbolic Systems program at Stanford. She is interested in using computational models as well as behavioral experiments to study how people process language. Her work focuses on psycholinguistics, pragmatics, and bilingualism.
Ahmad Jabbar
Ahmad is a Linguistics PhD student. He works on formal pragmatics and semantics, with interests in computation theory, nlp, and psycholinguistics. His current projects focus on compositionality and discourse structure.
Undergraduate Students
Madigan Brodsky
Madigan is an undergraduate linguistcs student at Stanford. She is broadly interested in language as a product of more general cognitive processes, as well as linguistic applications in the legal field. She is currently working on projects involoving the resolution of linguistic vagueness in legal contracts, investigations into the linguistic effects of orthographic constructions in English, and building further research regarding uncertainity and causation.
Neil Rathi
Neil is an undergraduate student studying Linguistics and Math. He is interested in morphology and pragmatics. Specifically, he is interested in probabilistic models of language processing and comprehension, as well as their broader cross-linguistic and typological implications.
Lian Wang
Lian is an undergraduate linguistics major. She is broadly interested in situating language in the human cognitive system. She works on syntax and computational models of language.
