People in the Lab
Angela Carpenter
Assistant Professor of Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences
B.A., Wellesley College; M.A., Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Amherst
How do humans learn language? This question first led me to study linguistics and still fascinates me today. Thus, much of my research has focused on the phonological acquisition of language, both child language and adult second language acquisition. I have worked on the acquisition of stressed syllables and function words by children learning their first language, and with adults I have studied factors that affect acquisition of a second language. Currently in my lab I am continuing my investigation into the acquisition of phonological stress by adults learning an artificial grammar. I'm also continuing to explore children’s acquisition of stress in multisyllabic monomorphemic words. Another interest is in the phonology of creoles. I am exploring questions of dialect loss and dialect shift among native speakers of Jamaican Creole who live in the United States and other English-speaking countries.
Angela Carpenter’s faculty web page.
Andrea Levitt
Margaret Clapp ’30 Distinguished Alumna Professor of French and Linguistics
B.A., Wellesley College; M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Yale University
I was trained as a linguist, so I am very interested in how languages are structured and how they change over time. My research focuses on how people learn both their first and second languages. My current work centers on the ability of infants to discriminate speech sounds and the age at which infants' vocal productions begin to reflect the speech patterns of the adult speakers around them. I also study the acquisition of speech sounds and native-like prosody by second-language learners.
Andrea Levitt's faculty web page.
Research Assistants
Current
Emily Anderson, Class of 2014
Emily is a Cognitive and Linguistics Sciences major and a Mathematics minor at Wellesley College. She is most interested in the combinatorial patterns of language structure, particularly in language acquisition and impairment. Furthermore, she is interested in cross-language and cross-modality patterns of impairment. In the future, she hopes to work specifically with developmental speech impediments in young children.
Sam Burke, Class of 2014
Sam is a Linguistics and German double major at Wellesley College. Currently, she's interested in combining her majors with another of her passions - environmental activism - to study how the language surrounding environmental issues shapes the responses and actions of politicians, businesses, media and citizens in Germany and the US. She strongly believes that the rigorous analysis of our environmental discourse would beneficially influence environmental policies. She looks forward to her participation in the Albright Institute this coming winter and her time abroad next spring (in Berlin!) as a means to accelerate and inform her exploration of environmental issues and policies across disciplines and nations.
Laura Dulude, Class of 2013
Laura is a Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences major at Wellesley. Her interests lie in sociolinguistics, phonetics, and language variation/change. A paper she wrote in LING 319 (The Spoken and Written Word) about dyslexia across languages was recently published in the Indiana Undergraduate Journal of Cognitive Science. Currently, she is working with Professor Andrea Levitt on her research about vocal attractiveness.
Morvareed Rezaian, Class of 2014
Morvareed is a Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences major and Psychology minor at Wellesley College. Her interests lie in phonetics, psycholinguistics, and invented languages. She is currently working on a philosophy of language paper on silencing with Professor Mary Kate McGowan. In the future, she hopes to create an artificial language to be used in works of fiction.
Ran Wei, Class of 2013
Ran is a Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences major at Wellesley College. She loves learning different languages and is interested in exploring the meaning of language as a human capacity. Her other interests include literature, art, and music, and she did a comparative research on rhythms in speech and instrumental film music with Professor Levitt during the summer of her sophomore year.
Previous Research Assistants
Kristine Bundschuh, Class of 2012
Kristine is a Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences and Spanish double-major at Wellesley College. Her linguistic interests lie in phonology and sociolinguistics. During her senior year, Kristine completed a linguistics independent study in which she wrote an article called “D-deletion in Andalusian Spanish: A morpho-phonemic phenomenon with frequency-induced spreading.” This article has recently been published in the Indiana Undergraduate Journal of Cognitive Science.
Past
Shelby Robertson, Class of 2013
Shelby is a Japanese Language and Literature major and History minor at Wellesley College. She is interested in sociolinguistics, and under the Mellon Mays Fellowship during the summer of her sophomore year completed a survey of the sociolinguistic attitudes of French Creoles born in California. Her research interests in Japanese literature lie in the narrative structure and author voice in Heian women's diaries.
