A group of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins, are offering one-on-one mentoring about applying to our department, with priority given to prospective students from underrepresented groups. The sign up form will remain open until November 15, but we strongly encourage you to respond by November 5 for […]
Dog, cat, and leash: Difference in processing costs among inflectional allomorphs during speech production. Abstract: We need to generate contextually-appropriate inflections to produce well-formed words and sentences, and a key component of this process is generating the correct allomorph – variant pronunciations of a morpheme. In this project, we examine the processing costs of the English regular […]
The language system in the human brain. ABSTRACT: The goal of my research program is to understand the representations and computations that enable us to share complex thoughts with one another via language, and their neural implementation. A decade ago, I developed a robust new approach to the study of language in the brain based on identifying […]
PhD applications for Fall 2023 due as well as MA applications for Summer 2023 and Fall 2023 due.
Investigating compositional visual knowledge through challenging visual tasks ABSTRACT: Human vision manifests remarkable robustness to recognize objects from the visual world filled with a chaotic, dynamic assortment of information. Computationally, our visual system is challenged by the enormous variability in two-dimensional projected images as a function of viewpoint, lighting, material, articulation as well as occlusion. […]
Approximate Analysis by Synthesis: Towards a Computational Theory of Vision ABSTRACT: Vision is humans' underappreciated superpower. It gives us the miraculous ability to perceive the three-dimensional structure of the world from the complex pattern of light rays which are imaged on our retinas. Vision can be conceptualized as Analysis by Synthesis, formalized by Bayesian probability […]
Acquiring syntactic variation: regularization in wh-question production. ABSTRACT: Children are often exposed to language-internal variation. Studying the acquisition of variation allows us to understand more about children’s ability to acquire probabilistic input, their preferences at choice points, and factors contributing to such preference. Using wh-variation as a case study, this dissertation explores the acquisition of […]
Canonical dimensions of vision. For department members, department major/minor undergraduate students, and invited guests. In-person and on Zoom.
Selection in Written Language Production: Evidence from Aphasia ABSTRACT: Most models of word production assume that in the process of producing a target word, multiple distractors also get activated, both other words (at the lexical level) and other phonemes/letters (at the segmental level). Thus, a selection mechanism is needed to select the targets at each […]
Development of relational reasoning: When do children pass the Relational Match-to-Sample task? ABSTRACT: Relational ability—the ability to compare situations or ideas and discover common relations – is a key process in higher-order cognition that underlies transfer in learning and creative problem solving. For this reason, it has generated intense interest both among developmentalists and in […]