Adele Goldberg is a linguist by training and a psychologist by choice. Her research focuses on the constructionist approach to language, which views language as a product of both form and function. Prof Goldberg studies statistical and functional factors in an effort to explain our creative but constrained use of language in typical and atypical populations, and in child and adult learners.

Adele Goldberg has been a professor of psychology and linguistics at Princeton University since 2004. She is the author of Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure (1995), Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language (2006), and Explain Me This: Creativity, Competition, and the Partial Productivity of Constructions (2019).

Arielle graduated from Wellesley College, where she received her B.A. in psychology and taught preschool. Arielle is interested in learning, curiosity, and motivation in early childhood, and the roles that adults play in shaping children’s enthusiasm about learning. Outside of lab, Arielle is usually playing elaborate board games, looking for new coffee shops, or begging her cat Fideo for affection.

Nicole is a fourth-year PhD student working with Adele Goldberg and Casey Lew-Williams. Nicole is interested in all things language– how it is learned, how it is used, and how it can be modeled. Nicole is focusing on how autistic individuals use language, and how the functions of constructions constrain their combination. Nicole received her B.A. in CogSci at U. of MI (go blue!).

Professor Casey Lew-Williams studies how babies learn, with a particular focus on language and communication. He is interested in how babies learn and generalize patterns, how toddlers efficiently process what their parents say, how home language experience shapes learning, and why some children learn more easily than others. He studies various populations — including children learning two languages and children growing up in poverty — to ask questions about the foundations and high-stakes consequences of early learning.

Savithry Namboodiripad is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and the director of the Contact, Cognition, & Change Lab. Her research focuses on how language ideologies and use interact in multilingual contexts to shape patterns of language change, and she uses experimental methods to study contact and variation in flexible constituent order.

Momna is from Jersey City, NJ. She is a prospective Psychology major with a concentration in Linguistics. She is interested in studying the acquisition of speech in children with speech impediments and hopes to pursue a career in Speech-Language Pathology in the near future. In her free time, she enjoys baking, gardening, and watching movies.