CUNY Psycholinguistics

What we do

The Psycholinguistics *Lab studies language and the mind. Directed by Professor Spencer Caplan at the CUNY Graduate Center, we combine approaches from linguistics, psychology, and computer science to work towards the long-term goal of understanding the algorithms and mental representations which form the basis of our knowledge of Language. We study both what is represented in the mind (from perceptual categories to abstract concepts) and how discrete internal states interface with continuous, graded behavior in the world.

Much of this work would most naturally be labeled language acquisition, language processing, or computational linguistics, though the specific questions we study vary widely (see more details regarding past and ongoing Projects below). The methods used to study these topics are in turn diverse and span computational modeling, laboratory experiments, quantitative analysis of corpus data, and pure theory building.

Above all, we emphasize a commitment to discrete representations, causal mechanisms, and simple explanations in the study of language, learning, and cognitive processing. Many lines of inquiry involve the study of intermediate mental structures recruited during real-time processing and learning rather than direct Input/Output mappings.

Research Areas

People

Faculty

Spencer Caplan
Chief cook and bottle washer

Graduate Students

Shameed Job
MA student, Computational Linguistics
Matt Malone
PhD student, Linguistics
Griffin Pion
PhD student, Philosophy
Elliot Schwartz
PhD student, Philosophy
Zaid Tabaza
PhD student, Linguistics

Friends and Collaborators

Karthik Durvasula
Michigan State
Doug Guilbeault
Stanford
Alon Hafri
Delaware
Jordan Kodner
Stony Brook
Eric Mandelbaum
the CUNYverse
Charles Yang
UPenn

Alumni

Leila Habibi
MA, Computational Linguistics

Lab History

Psycholinguistics at The CUNY Graduate Center has a long and illustrious history. From the 1980s up to her retirement in 2020, the Psycholinguistics Lab was organized by Janet Fodor along with Dianne Bradley. Their intellectual and social leadership in the area of Sentence Processing is something to be admired, and it is thanks to them that for over thirty years the Annual Meeting of the Society for Human Sentence Processing was officially known as the “CUNY Conference” on Human Sentence Processing.

The lab is now directed by Spencer Caplan. Please feel free to explore and please reach out if you’d like more information about past, present, and future lab activities and the psycholinguistics and cognitive science community at the Graduate Center. The lab is housed in the Linguistics Program, but many of our members and friends come from across the GC (including Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and other programs), as well as NYC and beyond. We are the CUNY branch of the StarLab.