People

Professor Mintz’s research interests center around the congnitive mechanisms underlying language aquisition. In a current project, he is finding that infants have started to form rudimentary representations of the grammatical units of their language, such as verb inflections, by 15 months of age. He also uses computational modeling techniques, methods from computer science, and experiments with adults as tools in testing and forming theories of language development in children.

Neshat is a Ph.D. student in the Brain and Cognitive Science Psychology program. She earned her M.A. in Linguistics from Boston University and her B.A. in English Language and Linguistics from the University of Gothenburg. Her research focuses on non-adjacent dependency (NAD) learning in the visual domain, examining how adults detect and process patterns in dynamic, non-linguistic stimuli, and she is interested in bridging behavioral research with computational modeling approaches.

Olesia is a PhD student in Brain and Cognitive Sciences. She graduated from UCSD, majoring in Psychology with a Developmental specialization minor. She thinks that learning about cognitive abilities across human development is captivating. Her specific research interests are language comprehension, acquisition, and word learning. Currently, her research explores how young children use language categories.

Zoey is a graduate student in the psychology department, specializing in the area of developmental psychology. Her research interests center on the role of statistical learning mechanisms in different aspects of language learning, with a particular focus on visual non-adjacent dependencies learning, and early word segmentation tasks. Her current project aims to explore whether 9-month-olds could pick up the simple repetition rules embedded in the actions performed by a novel object through a visual habituation paradigm.

Victoria is a PhD student in Developmental Psychology. She graduated from College of William and Mary with a major in psychology and minor in data science. After that, she earned her master’s degree in developmental psychology at Columbia University. Her research focuses on child language development and its synergy with the development of other cognitive skills, such as conceptual representations and theory of mind. She is particularly interested in word learning, syntax, and cross-linguistic comparisons.

Helen completed her PhD in Developmental Psychology in 2024. During her time at USC, she published several papers examining statistical learning in both infants and adults. Her dissertation focused on the cognitive mechanisms underlying statistical learning in infants and adult second language learners, specifically exploring how language structure and bilingualism influence the detection of statistical regularities. Helen is currently a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia, where she is continuing her research on bilingualism and early language acquisition with Dr. Janet Werker and Dr. Alexis Black.

Recent: ZS Associates

Recent: Pushkin Project

Recent: Professor, Nanjing Normal University

I got my BA in Psychology and East Asian Language and Culture Studies at University of Southern California. Then I got my Ph.D. in Human Development at University of Maryland, College Park. My research interests include phonological development in infants and children, second language acquisition, speech prosody, bilingualism, and reading development. Currently I am working on a project that examines tone acquisition and word learning among Mandarin-English bilingual, monolingual English, and monolingual Mandarin infants. Eventually I’d like to get a tenure-track faculty position in a research university. But right now my son (born on Feb 26, 2014) occupies all my time and attention.

Recent: Amazon Web Services

Recent: Occidental College

Recent: Airbnb

Recent: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Recent: Cal. Sate, Long Beach

Recent: Brock University