Gary Lupyan | lupyan at wisc . edu


I am currently an Assistant Professor of Psychology at University of Wisconsin at Madison. Before that I was an IGERT postdoctoral fellow at University of Pennsylvania affilitated with the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science (IRCS), and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (CCN)

Please see the projects page for a (now somewhat outdated) summary of some past and current projects. At Penn, I was working with Sharon Thompson-Schill and Dan Swingley.

My main interests revolve around the interaction between language and other cognitive processes: How does language change the way we categorize and perceive the world? What non-communicative aspects of human behavior are impaired in cases of acquired language deficits such as aphasia? What kinds of thinking depends most on language? Asked another way: what aspects of human cognition were made possible or improved by the evolution of language?

Some of my and my colleagues' work on the subject of language and thought has been profiled in the New York Times: "When Language can Hold the Answer (NYT link) | (local link). and The New Scientist (local link)

An additional interest is trying to understand why language is the way it is by analyzing sociolinguistic factors. For example, how do languages vary as a function of whether they are used by a diverse population that includes adult learners of the language, or in a tightly-knit small group in which the language is acquired exclusively as a native language by infants.

Along with Rick Dale, I published an article in PLoS ONE, showing that the socio-demographic environment within which a language is learned and used may constrain the structure of the language (specifically, morphological encoding). It has been covered in some blogs and such, and in the Economist.

Along with Lauren Emberson, Mike Spivey and Mike Goldstein, we introduced the term 'halfalogue' into the blogosphere.

I have broad interests in neural coding, particularly the ways in which reentrant (or recurrent) neural processing gives rise to mental representations that are stable enough to persist in time yet flexible enough to be dynamically modulated by current context and task demands.

Publications, Presentations, etc. | Vitae | A Brief Bio - where did I come from? where did I go? | Description of Projects | Personal