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 foci include the acquisition of linguistic variation, cross-situational word learning, and language-event cognition interface. In my work, I use experimental methods – including artificial language learning and eye-tracking, and quantitative 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 probe how linguistic descriptions of events interact with non-linguistic representation of events.