Welcome to the Language and Computation Lab!

The Language and Computation Lab is located in the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, at the National University of Singapore. Research at the LCL is devoted to studying the organization of language in human memory. We use a range of methodologies, including experimental psycholinguistics, analysis of corpora and archival data, and computational modeling, to investigate how people understand, produce, and learn words.

We like to think of the words that we know as being organized in a language network in our memory. Just like how you are embedded in a social network of familiy, friends, and acquaintances, words reside in a memory representation whose connectivity structure reflects the phonological, orthographic, and semantic relationships that words can have with other words. To help us uncover the structural properties of language networks, we draw on ideas, techniques, and models from modern Network Science - an interdisciplinary field that studies complex networks of all sorts (the Internet, social systems, ecological networks, and many more).

Thanks for stopping by and we hope that you’ll enjoy learning about our research. Recent updates from the lab are provided below, a full list of publications can be found here, and if you are interested to learn more about our Singapore English (aka Singlish) research, have a look here.

Latest News

• June 2024:
  • The lab has had quite a few publications related to the Singlish word association project:
    • 1. Preliminary data from NUS students for the wiki-300 list of Singlish concepts is published in the Journal of Open Psychology Data, with Jin Jye Wong as the lead author.
         
    • 2. A peer-reviewed CogSci 2024 proceedings on the prevalence of Singlish concepts, which Cynthia will present a poster at the CogSci conference.
    • 3. A fun side-quest comparing the humor of words from various English dialects, including Singapore English. Read the preprint here.
  • Cynthia is off to CogSci 2024 in Rotterdam! She will present two posters, one on the prevalence of Singlish concepts across the Singaporean population, and another on preliminary analyses of the Chinese character network. She also has a talk about memory search using semantic fluency tasks for a symposium on “Dynamics of Memory Search”, organized by Dr. Abhilasha Kumar.
  • Other news:
    • A cool co-authored publication with Dr. Nichol Castro on phonological distance effects among persons with aphasia is out!
    • Cynthia is one of the invited speakers for the Conference on Complex Systems later this year in Exeter, UK!
    • Funky results about landmark nodes in the phonological network will be presented at the Virtual Math Psych conference ;)