Yiran Chen

I received my PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2023, and am currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Infant Learning Lab at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.   At Penn, I was a member of the Child Language Lab ,  Language and Cognition Lab  and Language, Variation and Cognition Lab. 

My research focuses on language learning and its interface with other aspects of cognition. So far, I have explored questions on the acquisition of linguistic variation and word learning. In my work, I use quantitative methods – including artificial language learning and eye-tracking, and corpus analyses to inform one central question: what kinds of information – in the linguistic, social and referential context –  do children track real-time when learning language? In another line of work, I explore how linguistic descriptions of events interact with non-linguistic representation of events.