Director: Spencer Caplan
The Psycholinguistics Lab at The CUNY Graduate Center combines research in linguistics, psychology, computation, and cognition with the ultimate goal of understanding the algorithms and mental representations which form the basis of our knowledge of Language. We have recent and active projects in a wide range of areas including:
- Speech processing
- Sentence parsing
- Language production
- Word and concept learning
- Mechanisms underpinning “statistical learning” and apparently “rational” behavior
- Processing at the semantics-pragmatics interface
- Evolutionary pressures on language
- Acquisition of phonological systems (e.g. vowel harmony)
- Learning and coordination in social settings
The methods used to study these topics are in turn diverse and include:
- Categorization studies
- Computational modeling
- Eye-tracking
- Perceptual learning
- Acceptability judgements
- Coordination games
- Quantitative analysis of corpus data
We emphasize a commitment to mechanisms and simple explanations in the study of language, learning, and cognitive processing. Many lines of inquiry involve the study of intermediate representations recruited during real-time processing and learning rather than just Input/Output mappings.
Psycholinguistics at The CUNY Graduate Center has a long and illustrious history. Until recently, the Psycholinguistics Lab was organized by Janet Fodor and Dianne Bradley. Their leadership in the area of Sentence Processing is well known, and it is thanks to them that for over thirty years the Annual Meeting of the Society for Human Sentence Processing was officially known as the “CUNY Conference” on Human Sentence Processing.
The lab is now directed by Spencer Caplan, and these pages are in the process of being updated. Please feel free to explore and please reach out if you’d like more information about past, present, and future lab activities and the psycholinguistics community at the Graduate Center. The lab is housed in the Linguistics Program, but many of our members and collaborators come from across the GC (including philosophy, psychology, and speech-language-hearing) as well as the greater New York area.