 My main research interest is in children's developing cognitive abilities. More specifically, I'm interested in children's language acquisition. I focus primarily on the acquisition of morphological and syntactic aspects. I am also interested in the factors that contribute to children's word learning, including how they learn nouns vs. verbs, or how reliability judgments play a role in word learning. The linguistic theoretical frameworks I mostly adopt are Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar. In cognitive psychology I am mostly sympathetic with the Embodied Cognition approach. I do the language research under the supervision of Dr. Catharine H. Echols in the Children's Research Laboratory. My second research focus is on the growing field known as Cognitive Science of Religion. The field is mainly seeking for cognitively-oriented explanations for an array of religious and other supernatural phenomena. More specifically, I am interested in investigating the way people reason about rituals, that is, actions that do not display an intuitive and transparent causal mechanism. Ultimately, I want to understand more about how human's cognitive system supports the way we often deal with religion and supernatural beliefs in general. This research is supervised by Dr. Cristine H. Legare in the Cognition, Culture and Development Lab. My third academic interest is more of a methodological nature. I am interested in the continuous informed use of statistical techniques in linguistics research. I'm particularly interested in statistical modeling in linguistics that uses the language R (The R Core Development Team) as its main tool. I intend to make the "statistical way of thinking" more available to undergraduate and graduate students of Linguistics in Brazil. Since 2008, I have been teaching a variety of introductory online courses on Statistics and R. This line of research is done in collaboration with Dr. Heliana R. Mello at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil. Information about the online courses can be found here. Contact Info: André Luiz Souza The University of Texas at Austin Department of Psychology 1 University Station A8000 Austin, TX - 78712 - USA Office: SEA 1.318D Phone: (512) 553-8009 E-mail: andreluiz@mail.utexas.edu |