Postdocs

Jon Carr

Jon completed his PhD in the Centre for Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Simon Kirby, Kenny Smith, and Jennifer Culbertson. In his PhD he explored the evolution of language and conceptual systems through a combination of Bayesian modelling and experiments.

In the lab, Jon carries out artificial lexicon experiments, studying how readers familiarize themselves with novel words in either familiar or unfamiliar scripts. He also studies how this learning is affected by type and token frequency. You can find more information about Jon at his website.

Francesca Franzon

Francesca got her MS and PhD in Linguistics at the University of Padova, Italy, before joining Davide's lab at SISSA in 2017. She's been mostly working on Number and Gender morphology, and explored connections between this and core cognitive abilities.

In the lab, Francesca tries to understand the role of the statistical patterns in language use, as well as the role of core cognitive extra-linguistic factors in shaping morphological systems and in the processing of morphology.

 

Jana Hasenaecker

Jana studied Linguistics at Humboldt-University Berlin and got her PhD in Psychology from the Free University Berlin in cooperation with the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development. Her main research interest is visual word recognition in reading development.

Jana came to the lab thanks to funding from the DFG (German Research Council) to explore whether children's visual word identification system is sensitive to distributional information on morpheme position. She's now additionally investigating whether/how children (and adults) code for regularities in form-to-meaning mapping.

Maria Ktori

Maria got her PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Nottingham, working with Nicola Pitchford and Walter Van Heuven. She also held postdoc positions in Marseille (with Jonathan Grainger) and at the Royal Holloway University of London (with Kathy Rastle). Her main research interest is visual word identification, and reading more in general.

In the lab, Maria is working on the role of statistical learning in reading through behavioral, eye-tracking, neurophysiology and neuroimaging techniques.

Jarosław R. Lelonkiewicz

Jarek got is PhD at the Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, working with Martin Pickering and Holly Branigan. He also worked as a part-time Lecturer at Napier University, as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Edinburgh, and as a Research Assistant in several projects concerning language and memory. 

In the lab, Jarek is responsible for large-scale experiments investigating statistical learning. Using the magic of Python, he mines real languages to identify their features that might be critical for learning. He then runs experiments to test whether adults use these features when mastering new lexicons. To this end, he develops artificial languages and manipulate the saliency of their learning-critical features.

 

Yamil Vidal

Yamil has a degree in Psychology from the University of Buenos Aires and a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from SISSA, obtained under the supervison of Jacques Mehler and the co-supervision of Tristan Bekinschtein at the University of Cambridge, UK. During his PhD, he used EEG and pupillometry to study auditory speech processing from a Predictive Coding perspective.

In the lab, Yamil is developing EEG experiments aimed at investigating statistical mechanisms in the learning of a new script in adults. 

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