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.

Helen is currently pursuing a PhD in developmental psychology. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Linguistics from University of California, Los Angeles in 2018. After graduation, she joined the USC Language Development Lab as a PhD student. Her research focuses on topics related to language acquisition and the cognitive mechanisms associated with the process: how infants acquire fundamental syntactic knowledge about the language that they are learning, how environmental input affects the mechanism underlying this learning process, what are the constraints for infants and adults to learn statistical patterns from visual and auditory input, etc.

Neshat is currently a PhD student in the Brain and Cognitive Science Psychology program at the University of Southern California. She received her M.A. in Linguistics from Boston University. Her primary research interest lies in investigating non-adjacent dependency (NAD) learning, particularly in infants and adults, and exploring the significant implications of NAD learning and statistical learning on language development.

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.

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