Our Team

Current lab members:

Sammy Floyd, PhD, Principal Investigator I am currently faculty in Psychology at Sarah Lawrence College. Previously, I was an NSF postdoctoral fellow in Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) at MIT, working with Ev Fedorenko and Ted Gibson. I got my PhD in the Psychology department at Princeton University, working with Adele E. Goldberg and Casey Lew-Williams, and my BA at Smith College working with Jill de Villiers. I'm interested in language (especially words), language change and comprehension, and how adults and children learn (especially from a neurodiversity perspective). You can reach me by email here!

Stella Sommer, Research Assistant Stella is an undergraduate student concentrating in psychology and child development. Within LaDL, she is investigating intuitive reasoning about word origins, and its potential effects on word learning. Her work draws from areas of cognitive science such as theory theory and connectionism, as well as educational psychology and historical linguistics. In the future, she hopes to pursue clinical psychology, and is interested in attachment and regulation in early childhood and impacts of developmental trauma in adulthood.

Grace Hutchinson, Research Assistant

Camila Castrillon, Research Assistant Camila is an undergraduate student concentrating in psychology and LGBTQIA+ studies. Their work focuses on identity and power dynamics between social groups. Camila is interested in how a person's use of language implicitly signals power or privilege and how the use of language may help or harm a person's social mobility and relationships to others. They are interested to see how these effects change across different cultural contexts varying in era, region, language, and sociopolitical climate.

Nicole Imral, Research Assistant

Avery Yanowitz, Research Assistant Avery is an undergraduate student concentrating in Spanish and creative writing. He is passionate about linguistics, and is very excited to be working with the Language and Development Lab this summer! His studies right now focus on the interplay between phonology and language acquisition, particularly how words pattern across a lexicon. He is excited to see how this research grows and develops over time.

Alums:

Carmen Toribio Martinez, Research Assistant (Class of 2024)