Dr. Bergelson smiles in front of a grey-painted wooden wall

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 smiles in front of a tree and brick building

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 smiles while standing on a smooth stone sidewalk

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 stands next to a bed of red, white, orange, and yellow tulips.

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 smiles in front of a small waterfall

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 holds her amazing dog Shuri while standing near an athletic field

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 stands in a food market.

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.

Jen is pictured hiking in a snowy environment.

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 stands on a wooden pier

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 poses for a picture on a chair, facing the sunset.

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 stands grinning in front of the ornate doors of the Duke chapel. She wears a blue button-down shirt and has dark hair nd brown eyes.

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 beams at the camera while sitting on a hammock.. She has tan skin and long brown hair. She wears a black top and jean shorts. There is a leafy tree in the bckground.

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 sits in front of a window smiling. She has curly brown hair and wears a white shirt,

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.

Cai has black hair and glasses. She wears a collared white shirt with a bow at the collar and a brown paid skirt. She stands against a bright pink wall, holding a rotary phone to her ear.

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 smiles at the camera in a close-up selfie. She has natural hair pulled back in a bun, brown eyes, and wears a grey sweater and a necklace.

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 takes a selfie in a softly lit room. She has sandy hair and freckles and wears a denim jacket.

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 is laughing and looking at the camera. She wears a grey and white t-shirt, has light skin, and curly light brown hair. The clue blue sky and some grass are visible in the background.

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.

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*Due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, we are all working remotely.

Duke University, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience

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