• Research Statement
    The stunning ability to communicate abstract messages is a quintessential human trait that uniquely defines us in the animal kingdom. At the same time, human language is a complex behavior that presumably draws in large parts on evolutionarily younger neural/cognitive systems. Research in the Human Language Processing (HLP) Lab seeks to understand the computational cognitive systems that allow the human brain to communicate information at a rate and complexity that far exceeds that of other animals.
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  • T. Florian Jaeger and Katrina Housel Furth during fieldwork in the Yucatan in 2009
  • Typological analysis
  • Robust language understanding in a variable world
  • Speech Perception
  • Alignment

Language science that caught our ear

HLP Lab now runs an informal talk series. Work we dig, that caught our attention, researchers we're curious about, and lots of discussion. Sometimes per Skype, sometimes by collocation. Thank you to our presenters for making time.


06 December 2018: Jiří Zámečník (Graduate Student, English, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg) UID in Early Modern English

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29 November 2018: Grace Wenling Cao (Graduate Student, Linguistics, University of York) Phonetic convergence of Hong Kong English towards native English accents and the effect of language attitudes

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15 November 2018: Guillermo Montero Melis (Postdoc, Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm University) Wanna replicate embodiment effects? Do you have the power?

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30 October 2018: Timo Roettger (Postdoctoral researcher, Linguistics, Northwestern University) Prediction and adaptation in prosodic processing

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12 April 2017: Rachel Tatman (PhD student, Department of Linguistics, University of Washington) Skype talk

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28 February 2017: Andrés Buxó-Lugo (PhD student, Department of Cognitive Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Expectations and adaptation in prosodic processing

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23 February 2017: Eleanor Chodroff (PhD student, Department of Cognitive Sciences, Johns Hopkins University) Uniformity in talker-specific phonetic realization: Evidence from sibilant fricatives in American English and Czech

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14 February 2017: Rachel Smith (Senior Lecturer, English Language and Linguistics, University of Glasgow) Skype talk

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02 February 2017: Amelia Kimball (PhD student, Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign) Categorical vs. Episodic Memory for Pitch Accents in American English

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23 January 2017: Bruno Nicenboim (PhD student, Department of Linguistics, University of Potsdam, Germany) Models of retrieval in sentence comprehension: A computational evaluation using Bayesian hierarchical modeling

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03 November 2016: Laura Gwilliams (PhD student, Cognition and Perception Doctoral Program, New York University) In spoken word recognition, the future predicts the past.

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16 May 2016: Kuniko Nielsen (Assoiciate Professor, Linguistics, Oakland University) Skype talk

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