The Morgan lab welcomes two new postdocs this year!

Dr. Lean Luo joins us from Tsinghua University where he completed his PhD in Linguistics with a focus on Developmental Psychology. His research explores the mental processes underlying human language across different populations—from infants to adults—in an effort to better characterize the fundamental units and computations that support language development and use.

Emily Morgan and Masoud Jasbi co-taught a course at this summer's LSA Summer Institute on "Computational models of generalization and item-specificity." Click here to read the course description.

Congratulations to Dr. Zachary Houghton and Dr. Skyler Reese for completing their dissertations!

Dr. Houghton's dissertation was titled "Multi-Word Representations in Minds and Models: Investigating the Storage of Multi-Word Phrases in Humans and Large Language Models". His committee members were Emily Morgan, Masoud Jasbi, and Fernanda Ferreira.

Dr. Reese's dissertation was titled "Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling of Linguistic Vagueness and Elasticity". Her committee members were Emily Morgan, Masoud Jasbi, and Santiago Barreda-Castañón.

The Morgan lab went to the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) for the first time this year! Zachary Houghton, Kenji Sagae, and Emily Morgan presented their recent work titled, "The Role of Abstract Representations and Observed Preferences in the Ordering of Binomials in Large Language Models." You can view the paper here!

Emily Goodwin, Beth Levin, and Emily Morgan presented their recent work at CogSci 2025. The paper is titled "Syntactic Choice Is Shaped by Fine-Grained, Item-Specific Knowledge". You can read it here!

Several students and faculty from UC Davis attended HSP 2025!

Zachary Houghton and Emily Morgan presented their recent work at the Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing 2025. Their poster is titled, "The effects of frequency and predictability on the representation of multi-word phrases in English." You can view the abstract here!

Emily Goodwin and Emily Morgan presented their recent work at the Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing 2025. Their poster is titled, "Dative Ordering Preferences in English: Productive Constraints, Item-Specific Experience & Frequency." You can view the abstract here!

Congratulations to Dr. Nicole Dodd for completing her dissertation titled, "Sentence Processing in Relative Clauses in Standard Arabic"!

Her committee members were Emily Morgan, Fernanda Ferreira, and Masoud Jasbi.

Emily Morgan was awarded a three-year NSF grant on "Generalization versus item-specificity in language processing and change". The project will investigate how speakers of a language use both the ability to generalize and their knowledge of specific previously-encountered items. For example, speakers know that the past tense of a novel verb glorp is glorped but the past tense of run is the irregular ran. But the relationship between these two systems remains a subject of intense debate.