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

  • November 2023:
    • Cynthia is off to Psychonomics in San Francisco! She will present a talk at the main conference (new research comparing network and Levenshtein distances between word pairs), and two talks at the Society of Computation in Psychology (one about humor norms for words in various English dialects, and another about network science as a useful framework for studying the mental lexicon). Three talks! Never again :)
    • Jin Jye is off to Barin, Italy in November to present the LCL’s research on Singlish word association networks at the CogAI conference!
    • A couple of co-authored papers with Dr. Ying Li (The struggle for life among words) and with Dr. Massimo Stella (Hypergraph models of the lexicon) as leads have been accepted. Both are really cool papers that I am happy to have made a small contribution to. Do check them out!
    • Cynthia’s contribution to the online Oxford Bibliographies entry on “Spoken Word Recognition” has been accepted!
    • Cynthia gave a presentation about language networks to the Institute of Policy Studies’ Social Lab in October. A nice excuse to visit the very pretty Bukit Timah campus ;)

Last updated 31st Oct 2023

Site created using the postcards R package. Icons obtained from The Noun Project.

LCL@NUS


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

  • November 2023:
    • Cynthia is off to Psychonomics in San Francisco! She will present a talk at the main conference (new research comparing network and Levenshtein distances between word pairs), and two talks at the Society of Computation in Psychology (one about humor norms for words in various English dialects, and another about network science as a useful framework for studying the mental lexicon). Three talks! Never again :)
    • Jin Jye is off to Barin, Italy in November to present the LCL’s research on Singlish word association networks at the CogAI conference!
    • A couple of co-authored papers with Dr. Ying Li (The struggle for life among words) and with Dr. Massimo Stella (Hypergraph models of the lexicon) as leads have been accepted. Both are really cool papers that I am happy to have made a small contribution to. Do check them out!
    • Cynthia’s contribution to the online Oxford Bibliographies entry on “Spoken Word Recognition” has been accepted!
    • Cynthia gave a presentation about language networks to the Institute of Policy Studies’ Social Lab in October. A nice excuse to visit the very pretty Bukit Timah campus ;)

Last updated 31st Oct 2023

Site created using the postcards R package. Icons obtained from The Noun Project.