TedLab: People

People

PI: Ted Gibson

GRADUATE STUDENTS:

Leon Bergen

Richard Futrell

Melissa Kline

Kyle Mahowald

Richard’s webpage

Melissa’s webpage

Kyle's webpage

Leon is interested in computational and experimental approaches to semantics and pragmatics. He is currently working on models of presupposition and reference resolution. He has done previous work on scalar implicatures and social cognition, and has broad interests in the overlap between linguistics, cognitive science, and computer science.

Richard is interested (so far) in how the pressure of managing information transfer between speakers shapes the structure of natural language(s). In pursuit of that goal, he likes to make computational models and analyze lots of naturalistic data in linguistic corpora. Phenomena he's worked on so far include grammatical gender and noun classifier systems, language change and grammaticalization, word order variation, typological generalizations such as the Accessibility Hierarchy, and discourse structure. His favorite non-English languages are Mandarin, German, and Hungarian.

Melissa is interested in the acquisition of structured representations in language - syntax, semantics (especially argument structure) and the interfaces between these levels. She hopes to study language as a cognitive problem, and to investigate the resources and representations children use to build a language. At MIT, Melissa hopes to tackle these problems using approaches from traditional psycholinguistics, cognitive science, and computational modeling.

Kyle is interested in how and why languages change (both syntactically and at the level of the word), the organizational structure of the lexicon (i.e., why we have the words we have instead of some other set of words), the relationship between communicative efficiency and natural language, historical English, language neuroimaging, and lexical-functional grammar. He approaches these questions through a combination of computational and experimental methods.

POST DOCS / RESEARCH SCIENTISTS:

Tim O'Donnell

Peter Graff

Ev Fedorenko

Tim's webpage

Peter's webpage

Ev's webpage

Tim is interested in building precise, computational models of the representations and mechanisms underlying language acquisition and processing. His research draws on experimental methods from psychology, formal modeling techniques from computational linguistics and natural language processing, and representations from linguistics. His most recent work has focused on the problem of productivity: why certain linguistic structures can be used to make new forms (e.g., -ness in pine-scentedness, googleableness, etc.), while others only occur in existing forms (e.g., -th in warmth, width, etc.).

Peter is interested in studying the extent to which the probabilistic patterning of sounds and words in natural language facilitates the efficient communication of intended messages from speaker to listener. He employs large-scale corpus studies, experimental methods, and probabilistic modeling to shed light on this question. While Peter's main focus lies on the study of probabilistic phonology, he also conducts quantitative research in phonetics, syntax, semantics, and sociolinguistics.

Ev is interested in the architecture of the language system and its relationship with other cognitive systems. She is a research scientist in Nancy Kanwisher's lab but is pursuing a number of projects in collaboration with TedLab.

VISITORS:

Frank Keller (Edinburgh)

RA's / UROPs:

Elizabeth Cain

Eunice Lim

AFFILIATES/COLLABORATORS

We continue to collaborate with many of the past lab members (see Alums below).

Here are some additional affiliates / collaborators:

Laura Dilley (Michigan State University)

Daniel Everett (Bentley University)

Peter Graff (MIT)

Patrick Grosz (MIT)

Andrea Gualmini (Utrecht University)

Roger Levy (UCSD)

Nancy Kanwisher (MIT)

Miguel Oliveira, Jr. (Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil)

Pritty Patel-Grosz (MIT)

Tyler Perrachione (MIT)

Rebecca Saxe (MIT)

Greg Scontras (Harvard University)

Josh Tenenbaum (MIT)

Nat Twarog (MIT)

ALUMS:

Ex-grad students:

Melissa Troyer (2011)
Current location: UCSD (San Diego, CA)

Steve Piantadosi (2011)
Current location: University of Rochester (Rochester, NY)
Website: http://web.mit.edu/piantado/www/

John Kraemer (2010)

Mike C. Frank (2010)
Current location: Stanford University (Stanford, CA)
Website: http://www.stanford.edu/~mcfrank/

Mara Breen (2007)
Current location: University of Massachusetts (Amherst, MA)
Website: http://www.people.umass.edu/mbreen/

Ev Fedorenko (2007)
Current location: MIT (Cambridge, MA)
Website: http://web.mit.edu/evelina9/www/

Florian Wolf (2004)
Current location: Munchen, Germany
Website: http://www.mergeflow.com/en/

Ken Nakatani (2004)
Current location: Konan University (Japan)

Franny Hsiao (2003)

Dan Grodner (2002)
Current location: Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, PA)

Duane Watson (2002)
Current location: University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign, IL)
Website: http://www.psych.uiuc.edu/~dgwatson/

Tessa Warren (2001)
Current location: University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA)
Website: http://www.pitt.edu/~tessa/

Edson Miyamoto (1998)
Current location: University of Tsukuba (Japan)
Website: http://www.lingua.tsukuba.ac.jp/etm/

Masha Babyonyshev (1996)

Carson Schutze (1995)
Current location: UCLA (Los Angeles, CA)
Website: http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/cschutze/

Colin Phillips (1995)
Current location: University of Maryland (College Park, MD)
Website: http://www.ling.umd.edu/colin/

Ex postdocs:

Hal Tily
Current location: San Francisco, CA
Website: http://web.mit.edu/hjt/www/

Raj Singh
Current location: Institute of Cognitive Science at Carleton University (Carleton, Canada)
Website: http://web.mit.edu/singhr/www

Jared Novick
Current location: University of Maryland, CASL (College Park, MD)
Website: https://sites.google.com/site/jaredmnovick/

Michael Wagner
Current location: McGill University (Montreal, Canada)
Website: http://prosodylab.org

Doug Rohde
Current location: Google, NYC
Website: http://tedlab.mit.edu/~dr/
The real website: http://www.google.com

San Tunstall

Edith Kaan
Current location: University of Florida (Gainesville, FL)
Website: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/kaan/

Whitney Tabor
Current location: University of Connecticut (Storrs, CT)
Website: http://solab.uconn.edu/People/Tabor/tabor.html

Ex visitors:

Anubha Kothari
Current location: Stanford University (Stanford, CA)
Webpage: http://www.stanford.edu/~anubha/

Meredith Brown
Current location: Rochester University (Rochester, NY)
Webpage: http://web.mit.edu/mbrown5/www/

Atanas Chanev
Current location: University of Trento (Italy)
Webpage: http://web.hit.bg/chanev/

Florian Jaeger
Current location: Rochester University (Rochester, NY)
Webpage: http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/fjaeger/index.html

Emannuel Bellengier
Current location: France
Webpage: n/a

Timmy Desmet
Current location: Belgium (We have lost Timmy to the business world)
Webpage: http://users.ugent.be/~tidesmet/

John Hale
Current location: Cornell University (Ithaca, NY)
Webpage: http://courses.cit.cornell.edu/jth99/

Ex UROPs still working on language or cognitive science more broadly (to the best of our knowledge):

Erin Conwell
Current location: North Dakota State University (Fargo, ND)

Christina Kim
Current location: Rochester University (Rochester, NY)
Webpage: http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/ckim/chris/index.html

[HOME]

Leon Bergen	Richard Futrell	Melissa Kline	Kyle Mahowald

	Richard’s webpage	Melissa’s webpage	Kyle's webpage

Leon is interested in computational and experimental approaches to semantics and pragmatics. He is currently working on models of presupposition and reference resolution. He has done previous work on scalar implicatures and social cognition, and has broad interests in the overlap between linguistics, cognitive science, and computer science.	Richard is interested (so far) in how the pressure of managing information transfer between speakers shapes the structure of natural language(s). In pursuit of that goal, he likes to make computational models and analyze lots of naturalistic data in linguistic corpora. Phenomena he's worked on so far include grammatical gender and noun classifier systems, language change and grammaticalization, word order variation, typological generalizations such as the Accessibility Hierarchy, and discourse structure. His favorite non-English languages are Mandarin, German, and Hungarian.	Melissa is interested in the acquisition of structured representations in language - syntax, semantics (especially argument structure) and the interfaces between these levels. She hopes to study language as a cognitive problem, and to investigate the resources and representations children use to build a language. At MIT, Melissa hopes to tackle these problems using approaches from traditional psycholinguistics, cognitive science, and computational modeling.	Kyle is interested in how and why languages change (both syntactically and at the level of the word), the organizational structure of the lexicon (i.e., why we have the words we have instead of some other set of words), the relationship between communicative efficiency and natural language, historical English, language neuroimaging, and lexical-functional grammar. He approaches these questions through a combination of computational and experimental methods.

Tim O'Donnell	Peter Graff	Ev Fedorenko

Tim's webpage	Peter's webpage	Ev's webpage
Tim is interested in building precise, computational models of the representations and mechanisms underlying language acquisition and processing. His research draws on experimental methods from psychology, formal modeling techniques from computational linguistics and natural language processing, and representations from linguistics. His most recent work has focused on the problem of productivity: why certain linguistic structures can be used to make new forms (e.g., -ness in pine-scentedness, googleableness, etc.), while others only occur in existing forms (e.g., -th in warmth, width, etc.).	Peter is interested in studying the extent to which the probabilistic patterning of sounds and words in natural language facilitates the efficient communication of intended messages from speaker to listener. He employs large-scale corpus studies, experimental methods, and probabilistic modeling to shed light on this question. While Peter's main focus lies on the study of probabilistic phonology, he also conducts quantitative research in phonetics, syntax, semantics, and sociolinguistics.	Ev is interested in the architecture of the language system and its relationship with other cognitive systems. She is a research scientist in Nancy Kanwisher's lab but is pursuing a number of projects in collaboration with TedLab.