Our faculty members maintain research laboratories in which they conduct cutting-edge studies exploring intriguing aspects of human communication and interaction.
Phonetics Lab
The UC Davis Phonetics Lab engages in cutting-edge linguistic research exploring the nature of sound patterns in the production and perception of speech. The emphasis at the PhonLab is on the acoustic measurement and perceptual evaluation of speech patterns, using laboratory phonology and psycholinguistic methods. The PhonLab is co-directed by Dr. Georgia Zellou and Dr. Santiago Barreda, and is dedicated to teaching and mentorship through numerous training programs at the graduate and undergraduate level. We have several lines of research ongoing in the PhonLab, including examining phonetic variation (production and perception), vowel perception (models and mechanisms), coarticulation, human-voice AI interaction, perception of apparent speaker characteristics, speaker production adaptations (clear speech, child-directed speech), social factors in phonetic imitation, and mechanisms of sound change.
Computational Linguistics Lab
At the Computational Linguistics Lab, co-directors Dr. Kenji Sagae and Dr. Raúl Aranovich investigate various aspects of the exciting intersection of language and computing. Their investigations coalesce methods and insights from various areas in linguistics and in computer science to advance understanding of the nature of language, its structure and its use, and to develop the fundamental ingredients of language ability in artificially intelligent machines.
They and their colleagues focus on issues of language structure, including syntax and semantics, and on various application areas, including assessment of child language development, modeling language change, modeling persuasion in political discourse, and language processing for cybersecurity. Their natural language processing (NLP) reading group includes undergraduate and graduate students and faculty members from various departments, with a wide variety of interests and backgrounds.
Language, Learning, and Logic Lab
The Language, Logic, and Learning Lab, directed by Dr. Masoud Jasbi, studies how humans understand and learn linguistic meaning. The lab uses behavioral experiments and observational studies with adults and children as well as formal and computational models to address questions at the interface of language development, natural language understanding, and the psychology and philosophy of language. The lab has a special focus on abstract logical concepts and their associated words such as negatives (e.g no, not, never, …) , conjunctions (e.g and, but, ), disjunction (e.g. or), conditionals (e.g if, whether, ), modals (e.g. maybe, might, can, should, must, ...), number words and quantifiers (e.g. some, many, every, … ). The lab is also interested in concepts such as ambiguity, vagueness, truth, lying, common ground, cooperative and uncooperative communication.
Morgan Computational Psycholinguistics Lab
The Computational Psycholinguistics Lab, directed by Dr. Emily Morgan, studies human sentence processing. The lab asks how people combine words and phrases to make larger phrases and sentences, how people comprehend the structure and meaning of these sentences in real-time, and how people make use of probabilistic expectations during language comprehension. A cornerstone of their approach is the integration of computational models -- to formalize and quantify theories -- with experimental psycholinguistic methods -- to test the model predictions against human data. In addition to investigating language processing, we also studying processing in other cognitive domains such as music and programming languages.
Corina Cognitive Neurolinguistic Research Lab
The Cognitive Neurolinguistic Research Lab, directed by Dr. David P. Corina, seeks to learn more about the development and organization of the human brain as well as the neurological systems that support language comprehension and production. The lab specializes in working with deaf children and adults who use spoken language and/or sign language. By studying deaf individuals, they are able to gain unique insight into the human brain and how factors such as deafness and language modality impact it. Additionally, studying the linguistic structure of signed languages yields invaluable clues as to the flexibility of the cognitive and neurological systems that support their use.
Ferreira Psycholinguistics Lab
The Ferreira Lab, directed by Dr. Fernanda Ferreira, conducts research in the area of psycholinguistics. They take advantage of basic insights from formal linguistics, especially theories in sentence phonology and syntax, to develop models of processing. Their empirical work relies both on behavioral and neural measures, including eyetracking (for measurement of fixations, saccades, and pupil diameter) and the recording of event-related potentials (ERPs). The fundamental aim of this work is to uncover the mechanisms that enable humans to understand and generate language in real time and in cooperation with other cognitive systems.