Stanford Language and Cognition Lab

Principal Investigator

Michael C. Frank (personal page)
Principal Investigator

Mike did his his undergrad at Stanford in Symbolic Systems and his PhD work at MIT. He is broadly interested in the relationship between language and cognition, especially as it relates to children's early language development.

Postdocs

Guido Pusiol (personal page)
Postdoc

Dan Yurovsky (personal page)
Postdoc

Dan did his graduate work at Indiana University and his undergrad at Carnegie Mellon. Having spent some time thinking about infant language learners as physical symbol systems and as attentionally-driven associationists, he's now trying to model them as social inference machines.

Graduate Students

Ali Horowitz
3rd year PhD Student

Ali completed a B.S. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester in 2008 and spent two years as a lab manager at MIT before beginning her graduate studies. She is interested in how children use language to make inferences about a speaker's knowledge.

Molly Lewis
2nd year PhD Student

Molly completed a B.A. in Linguistics at Reed College in 2009 and then spent two years as a lab manager in Duane Watson's lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In her graduate studies, she is interested in exploring how the language learner acquires an understanding of the relationship between language and conceptual structure.

Ann Nordmeyer
2nd year PhD Student

Ann completed a B.A. in Psychology at Smith College, where she worked for three years in the de Villiers lab studying language acquisition and language and thought. She is currently interested in examining pragmatic, semantic, and conceptual issues in the development of negation. Even though she spends her time thinking about negative utterances, she is actually a very positive person!

Undergraduates

Kaia Simmons
Human Biology Honors Student

Kaia is an undergraduate pursuing a B.A.H. in Human Biology. She is currently working on her Honors Thesis, which explores how children learn language through social interactions.

Research Staff

Ally Kraus
Lab Manager

After a year at Berkeley in Carla Hudson-Kam's lab, Ally is helping to build the Language and Cognition lab in its first years. In her spare time, she is attempting to acquire all skills.

Collaborators

Chigusa Kurumada
PhD Student (Stanford Linguistics)

Chigusa completed a M.A. at the University of Tokyo, and has been a Ph.D student in Linguistics at Stanford since 2008. She is interested in statistical and pragmatic inferences in children's first language acquisition.

Stephan Meylan
PhD Student (UC Berkeley Psychology)

Stephan graduated with a B.A. in linguistics from Brown in 2010 and then worked as a research assistant in the Language and Cognition lab for two years. He is now at UC Berkeley studying how aspects of natural language structure facilitate domain-general learning, and is co-advised by Mike Frank and Tom Griffiths.

Lab Alumni