Dr. Annemarie Kocab will be joining the Department of Cognitive Science as an Assistant Professor starting in July 2023. Her research seeks to understand what properties of the human mind give rise to language and how the structure of language reflects the structure of the mind.

She explores these questions by studying homesign systems, gestural systems created by deaf individuals who do not acquire an external language, and Nicaraguan Sign Language, a new language only 50 years old. Dr. Kocab also looks at parallel questions using language creation paradigms with children and adults in the laboratory. More recently, she has started work looking at language comprehension using EEG in American Sign Language users.

She received a PhD in Psychology from Harvard University and completed a postdoc at Harvard with Kate Davidson in Linguistics and Jesse Snedeker in Psychology.

Dr. Kocab is currently recruiting graduate students, postdocs, and a lab manager to join the lab starting Summer/Fall 2023. Please reach out at kocab@fas.harvard.edu if you are interested in any of these roles.