Current Team

Allyson works on meaning, with any tool she can get her hands on. She is currently investigating the interpretive mechanisms behind the famous Moses Illusion, and is exploring language processing in Chinese. She studied Linguistics and Psychology at Brandeis University, then studied in Nanjing, China, before spending 2 years managing NYU’s MEG lab. She holds an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Co-advisor: Alexander Williams and Philip Resnik.

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Lara is British, Swiss, or German, take your pick. She is interested in phonological processing and cognitive neuroscience, and much else besides. She’s currently working on maturational effects on learning and on the generation of lexical predictions. She did a BA in English and MPhil in Linguistics in Oxford, and she is a Fulbright Fellow and a UMD Flagship Fellow. In 2014-2015 she coordinated the PULSAR seminar for undergraduates. Co-advisor: Bill Idsardi.

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After completing his BA at Yale in Linguistics and Economics, Nick followed the economics path for a while, working in management consulting in the US and in his native Singapore. Realizing that the true path to wealth and glory lies in linguistics, he joined our research team in 2014. Nick is interested in syntax and language processing in native and non-native speakers. He has been working on tense in Mandarin (he found some!), and so-called ‘escapable islands’ in syntax.

Phoebe likes syntax, psycho/neurolinguistics, and running. What’s not to like! She did a BA in Linguistics at Yale, where she investigated Appalachian English as part of the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project; after a brief stint at the MPI for Cognitive Neuroscience in Leipzig, she spent a couple of years as a researcher at NYU, where she worked on the neuroscience of lexical processing using MEG. She joined our team in 2015 and is our 5th UMD Flagship Fellow.

Shevaun is a key figure in the Language Science Center. During her PhD at UMD she was instrumental in building the community that spawned LSC. After 3 years at Johns Hopkins University she has returned to UMD to help lead the center. Her LSC roles include managing our graduate programs, developing cross-cutting research, and building partnerships. Her research expertise is in psycholinguistics, language acquisition, and experimental pragmatics.