People
Up one levelPeople in the Language Learning Lab
- Nada Abukhdair
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I am a Senior at UC Davis, majoring in Psychology. I have always been interested in learning about the capabilities of the human mind and body, and the reason for those abilities. Working in the Language Learning Lab has given me a great understanding in the beginnings of language abilities in infants. I hope to further my knowledge in human mechanics as a Med student in the future.
- Stephanie Chen-Wu
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I'm a senior at UCDavis double majoring in Neurobiology, Physiology & Behavior and Psychology. I'm interested in language development, specifically the acquisition of multiple languages and the neural bases of speech in bilingual or multilingual speakers.
- Katharine Graf Estes, PhD (University of Wisconsin, Madison) , Assistant Professor, Psychology
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tel: 530-297-4455 office: 202 Cousteau, Room 233 keywords: learning mechanisms; language development
Infants are immersed in a world of immense complexity, yet they display knowledge of the people, objects, actions, and sounds in their environments very early in life. My research explores the mechanisms that support this early learning. In particular, the ability to detect statistical regularities may play a fundamental role in how infants learn about a highly complex, highly salient aspect of the auditory world: language. Infants become especially attuned to regularities in the sound patterns of the ambient language, including its phoneme distinctions, sound combinations within words, and its cues to word boundaries in fluent speech. Thus, when infants begin to understand and produce words, they do not start as a blank slate. I am investigating how infants learn from statistical regularities in the language they hear and the nature of what they learn.
- Karinna Hurley, MS, Graduate Student, Oakes Lab
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tel: 530-297-4416
office: 202 Cousteau PL, Suite 250, Room 228
I'm a third year graduate student in the Infant Cognition Lab. My two main research areas focus on infant memory (long-term and short-term) and the impact of early experiences at home on learning in the lab. Specifically, I investigate how early exposure to cats and dogs in the home influences infants' learning about pictures of cats and dogs. I also am interested in language development and work in the Language Learning Lab.
- Kelvin Tran, Undergraduate Research Assistant
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I am a fifth year majoring in Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior while minoring in Psychology. I'm interested in studying the development of human behavior, particularly language and memory. I work at the Language Learning Lab where we study the methodology of how infants acquire language. I am also a research assistant at the Memory and Development Lab studying children's physiological responses in the brain using MRI when they perform memory tasks. My goal is to become a pediatrician and continue working with children.