Elika Bergelson
Principal Investigator
Dr. Bergelson is an Assistant Professor in Duke’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience (personal page). Dr. Bergelson received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, where she first became interested in infant word-learning, Her training is in psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science.
Federica Bulgarelli
Former Post-Doc
Federica finished a PhD in Cognitive Psychology and Language Science from Penn State University (personal page). She is interested in how learners figure out what to do with variability stemming from different sources in their environment, such as different speakers or different languages. She is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Buffalo.
Stephan MEylan
Post-Doc
Stephan splits his time between the Bergelson Lab and the Computational Psycholinguistics Lab at MIT working on computational models of language acquisition and language processing (personal page). He recently completed a PhD in the Computational Cognitive Science Lab at UC Berkeley.
Carla Fernandez
Post-Doc Alum
Carla graduated from Penn State with a PhD in Cognitive Psychology and Language Science. She is interested in language processing differences in response to speaker variability. She is also deeply interested in the neural correlates of vocabulary acquisition in infants.
Charlotte Moore
PhD ALUM
Charlotte received a B.A. in psychology and linguistics from the University of Ottawa, and went on to do her Master’s in Linguistics at the same university, continuing work she began as an undergrad on speech perception in toddlers. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Concordia with Dr. Krista Byers-Heinlein.
Shannon Dailey
PhD ALUM
Shannon is a PhD student studying developmental psychology. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015 with a major in psychology and a minor in music. She began working with Dr. Bergelson in 2015, first as lab manager on the SEEDLingS team at the University of Rochester, and then as the BLAB manager at Duke. She is now a postdoc at the Duke Sanford School of Public Policy!
Erin Campbell
PhD Candidate
Erin graduated from Towson University in 2018 with a BA in speech language pathology, deaf studies, and disability studies. She is currently completing a PhD at Duke in Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience. Erin wants to better understand language processing and acquisition for children with sensory impairments.
JEssica MArlow
Research Assistant ’20
Jessica was a senior majoring in Global Health and Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, concentrating in Chinese, with a minor in Cultural Anthropology. She is interested in the role of parent-child interactions in child development as well as bilingualism.
Jing Liu
Research Assistant ’22
Jing is an alum majoring in psychology and statistics. She is interested in how children acquire their first words and categorize them into their existing network of knowledge.
Janani Ramadurai
Research Assistant ’21
Jen is a master’s student at UNC. In undergrad, she double majored in Linguistics and Neuroscience and minored in Computer Science. She is most interested in understanding how children acquire language and hopes to apply that knowledge to speech therapy in the future.
Hallie Garrison
Research Associate
Hallie graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 2013 with a B.A. in Sociology. She moved to Boston to work in childcare for three years, where she developed an interest in infant language acquisition. Hallie likes books, bikes, and beautiful places!
Aahnix Bathurst
Former Project Coordinator
Aahnix graduated from Amherst College in 2019 with a BA in German. He would sneak over to Umass Amherst to take linguistics courses nearly every semester. He loves learning about almost anything brain-related.
Natalie Chou
Research Assistant ’23
Natalie is a senior at Duke where she plans to pursue a Program II to explore her academic interests in both documentary studies and child health. After Duke, she hopes to attend medical school and continue working with children through healthcare and research. She is most interested in child language development, particularly in regards to multilingualism.
Sophie Barry
Research Assistant ’22
Sophie is a recent graduate who studied Psychology, Cultural Anthropology, and Spanish. She is interested in how infants learn words given the variability of input from their environments, specifically in the sense of hearing different accents. She is now a marketer at Michael Kors.
Catherine Byun
Research Assistant ’24
Catherine is a junior at Duke studying biology and psychology with hopes of going to medical school after she graduates. She is interested in how children’s environments affect language acquisition during early childhood and how this intersects with the natural biological components of language learning.
Lilli Righter
Lab Manager
Lilli graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park with a B.A. in Linguistics in 2020. There, she worked on research looking at infants’ acquisition of long-distance syntactic dependencies and wrote a thesis about early verb learning. She is thrilled to join BLAB and learn more about language development.
CaiMiao Liu
Research Assistant
Caimiao is a junior at Duke University studying psychology and sociology. She is interested in how children learn to distinguish the nuances among very similar words through early interactions as well as how they respond differently to multilingual environments.
Jasmine PflePsen
Research Assistant ’22
Jasmine is a recent graduate in Linguistics and minoring in Russian and French. She is most interested in multilingual language acquisition and how language acquisition interacts with literacy. She is now a Learning Support researcher at the American Institute for Research.
Olivia Leggio
Research Assistant ’22
Olivia is a recent Duke graduate who majored in linguistics and computer science. She is now a programmer in the Neurology department at UNC.
Taylor Horowitz
Research Assistant ’22
Taylor is a recent graduate with a degree in neuroscience. In the future, she hopes to attend medical school. She currently serves as a clinical research coordinator at Cohen Children’s Hospital.
Contact Us
Interested in contacting us? We’re here!*
*Due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, we are all working remotely.
Duke University, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience