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 Belluck (she/her)
Lab Manager
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 cuneo (she/her)
graduate student (cv)
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!).
Abby Fergus (she/her)
graduate student
Abby is a first-year PhD student working with Adele Goldberg and Casey Lew-Williams. Abby is interested in how children of all backgrounds and abilities learn their native languages. Abby received her B.S. in Psychology and her B.A. in Linguistics from William & Mary.
Crystal lee
graduate student
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
visiting researcher
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 hawkins
collaborator
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.
casey lew-williams
collaborator
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
collaborator
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 Rivera ’25 (she/her)
research assistant
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 Ahmed ’26 (she/her)
research assistant
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 Jamero ’24 (he/him)
research assistant
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.
Lab Alumni
Previous Graduate Students, Postdocs, and Visiting Researchers
Larissa Santos Ciríaco, Professor, Federal University of Minas Gerais
Karina Tachihara, Postdoc with Fernanda Ferreira at UC Davis
Sammy Floyd, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Sarah Lawrence College (previously postdoc
with Ev Fedorenko at Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT)
Libby Barak, Assistant Professor at Montclair State University.
Giulia Bencini, Associate Professor of Linguistics, University Ca Foscari, Venezia, Italy.
Matt Johnson, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs at Hult International Business School
Clarice Robenalt, Analytics Engineer at Zipline
Francesca Citron, Permanent Lecturer, Psychology Department, University of Lancaster, UK
Florent Perek, Assoc. Prof. of Cognitive Linguistics (Senior Lecturer), University of Birmingham, UK
Devin Casenhiser, Assoc. Prof. of Audiology & Speech Perception, University of Tennessee
Previous Undergraduates
Grace Grady ’20, Masters student at Rutgers University – Camden
Serena Mon ’20, PhD student, Department of Communication Sciences & Disorders, Northwestern University
Ana Patricia Esqueda ’19, PhD student, developmental psychology, University of Michigan
Alexia Hernandez ’19, PhD student, linguistics, Stanford University
Noe Claire Kong-Johnson ’19, grad student in linguistics at the University of Hawaii
Isaac Treves ’19, PhD student, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT
Sarah Reid ’18, Natural Language Processing Engineer, Seasalt.ai
Charlotte Jeppsen ’18, PhD student, psychology, University of Iowa
Jalisha Braxton ’16, Postdoc, Barnard College
Nick Tippenhauer ’16, PhD, psychology and human development, Vanderbilt University
David Abugaber ’14, Postdoc, neurolinguistics, University of Michigan
Jayden Ziegler ’11, PhD, psychology, Harvard University
Erica Wojcik ’09, Assoc. Prof., psychology, Skidmore College; executive director of the Cognitive Science
Society
Lara Klainerman Hochstein ’08, PhD, linguistics, UCSD
Gabriel Doyle ’05, Assoc. Prof., linguistics, SDSU