Instructors
Kayla Chen
Kayla Chen is a third-year PhD student with an interest in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, particularly in the predictive mechanisms in real-time language comprehension, and the interaction between language processing and domain-general cognitive processes (e.g., cognitive control, memory, attention).
Yiling Huo
Yiling Huo is a PhD student at UCL specialising in Linguistics (psycholinguistics). Her research focuses on prediction mechanisms during language comprehension. She is currently working on phonological information in prediction as well as the effect of task on prediction.
Yolanda García-Lorenzo
Yolanda García-Lorenzo is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of the Basque Country/UCL. She recently completed her PhD thesis in Linguistics on the role of Theory of Mind in irony-understanding. Her main research interests are irony, lies, developmental pragmatics and the cognitive abilities involved in pragmatic skills, all from a theoretical and empirical perspective.
Currently, she is focused on investigating the metarepresentational abilities involved in lies and irony understanding and production under the supervision of Joana Garmendia and Nausicaa Pouscoulous.
Jessica Goulston
Jessica Goulston is a second year Linguistics PhD student at UCL. She is interested in investigating possible gender differences in language in Autism, and how these may contribute to the under-diagnosis of females with the disorder. Her work focuses on examining the development of pragmatic abilities of children and adolescents within this population, using experimental methods.
Teru Konishi
Teru Konishi is a PhD student at UCL specialising in Linguistics (Pragmatics). His research focuses on the intersections between literature and linguistics, and his current doctoral work investigates the pragmatic theories that enable humans to comprehend, understand and appreciate allegory. His other academic interests include poems and poetic effects, philosophy of language, and art and communication.
Elisa Mattiauda
Elisa works on language and cognitive development in typical and atypical populations. Her doctoral research explores pragmatic and syntactic language abilities in adults with Down syndrome at risk for Alzheimer’s disease.
https://sites.google.com/view/elisamattiauda/home
Lily Nentcheva
Lily Nentcheva is a second year PhD student in the UCL Linguistics department. Her research focuses on how unpronounced elements in the syntax are processed during parsing. Secondary research interests include sentence processing in atypical and/or understudied populations, for example, individuals with developmental disorders and multilinguals.
Anna Teresa Porrini
Anna Teresa Porrini is a PhD student at the University of Trento (Italy) and Departmental Visitor here at UCL. She is interested in how non-literal language is interpreted during childhood, adolescence and adulthood. In particular, her research project focuses on scalar implicatures and how much the ability to attribute knowledge, intentions and beliefs to other people during conversation contributes to their derivation.
Erying Qin
Erying Qin works on experimental pragmatics, which aims to use methodologies drawn from the experimental psychology to investigate current theories of semantics and pragmatics for human language. Her doctoral work focuses on scalar inferences for different scalar words, particularly for paucal quantifiers.
Wenkai Tay
Wenkai Tay works on syntax, semantics and the syntax-semantics interface. His research focuses on the argument structure of resultatives in Mandarin and other East Asian languages.
Website: https://taywenkai.com
Disa Witkowska
Disa Witkowska is a PhD student in Language and Cognition at UCL. Disa is interested in language development and bilingualism. In her PhD research, she investigates if syntax develops in the same way in mono- and bilingual primary school children. She is also an open science enthusiast and aspiring R-coder, keen to discover more about statistics.
Xinxin Yan
Xinxin Yan is a final year PhD student in Linguistics at University College London. She's passionate about exploring meaning and the cognitive processes behind interpreting intended meaning. Her research is currently focused on unravelling how figurative language, such as metaphors and similes, is understood. For her doctoral thesis, she's developing a theoretical pragmatics framework to model simile comprehension within the relevance-theoretic framework.
Beyond academics, Xinxin enjoys reading philosophy and classic literature, hosting two podcasts on ximalaya.com about English poetry and The Analects, learning new languages (currently, 日本語), and engaging in activities like dancing and badminton.