Current Team
Meet our research team
2023-2024 LDLS research team
Laboratory Director and Principal Investigator
Dr. Kristen Syrett
Dr. Syrett is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics, with a co-appointment in the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS). Her areas of specialization are language acquisition and psycholinguistics, with a focus on semantics and pragmatics (meaning). She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Northwestern University in 2007, with specializations in Language and Cognition and in Cognitive Science. She also has an M.Ed. and AMI Montessori certification. Dr. Syrett has taken the Co-Active Training Institute coaching curriculum and the CTI leadership experience and assists for these courses, and is a proud HERS sister, having attended the H.E.R.S. Institute in CO. Before joining the faculty at Rutgers in 2011, Dr. Syrett spent three years as an NIH post-doctoral fellow at RuCCS, and one year as a RuCCS post-doc. She devotes her time outside of research to advocacy and service in the field of Linguistics, her two kids, her yoga practice and working out, baking, and her two mischievous beagles.
Laboratory Coordinator
Indira Das
Indira is a 5th year graduate student in the Rutgers Linguistics Ph.D. program. She works on linguistic theory with a focus Syntax/Morpho-Syntax and Semantics of Indo-Aryan languages. Her specific research interests include the semantics of the bare noun expressions, definite descriptions and number interpretations in the classifier languages, Odia and Bangla. In syntax, she is interested in the verbal domain, especially verbal complexes with auxiliary constructions, and how clausal negation interacts with them.
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Shuyan Wang
Shuyan earned her Ph.D in Linguistics from University of Connecticut. She works on language acquisition, especially the acquisition of Semantics, Pragmatics, and Syntax. Her specific topics of interest include the acquisition of scalar implicatures, free choice inferences, adjectives, and quantifiers. She focuses on how factors like grammar, maternal input, and processing can influence children’s language development. She is also interested in theoretical syntax and sign language studies, including numerals and classifiers in Mandarin and adjectives in American Sign Language.
Shuyan’s post-doctoral fellowship is supported by Dr. Syrett’s NSF grant BCS 2016963
Undergraduate Research Assistants
Maya Brisman
Vaishnavi Elanchezhian
Hanna Murphy
Jamie Oliver
Khushi Shah
Madison Skibicki