People

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 researched young children’s relationships, both real and imaginary. Arielle is interested in learning, curiosity, and motivation in early childhood, and the roles that imagination and pretense play in social and cognitive development. When she’s not in lab, Arielle is usually playing board games, looking for new coffee shops, or begging her cat, Fideo, for affection.

Nicole is a third-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!).

Crystal is a fifth-year PhD student working with Adele Goldberg and Casey Lew-Williams. She is interested in how children use various (social, environmental) cues, such as speaker information or visual variability, to learn words. Crystal received her B.S. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences and B.A. in Linguistics at the U. Rochester.

Shahar Shirtz received his PhD in linguistics from the University of Oregon, Eugene. His interests include linguistic typology, and the expression of discourse functions, and constructional models of grammar. His work concentrates primarily on Indo-Iranian languages and the languages of Western Oregon.

Robert is interested in the cognitive mechanisms that allow people to flexibly communicate, collaborate, and coordinate on social conventions in groups. He works on these problems using interactive multi-player experiments and computational models of communication and social reasoning. Robert is thrilled to be starting as an assistant professor of PSY at U of Wisc, F ’23, after being a C.V. Starr Fellow at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute.

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.

Jazmin is from Atlanta, Georgia. She is a Psychology concentrator on the pre-med track seeking certificates in Global Health and Health Policy as well as Latin American Studies.

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.

Emmanuel was born in the Philippines and grew up all over the Central Valley of California before settling in Madera. He is currently a Junior in Princeton University’s History department and is pursuing a certificate in Linguistics. He is interested in the study of child development and learning how factors such as neurotype, culture, and class affect development. In his free time, he enjoys playing video games and picking up as many different hobbies as humanly possible.