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

• March 2025:
  • Two publications to start off the Year of the Snake! One with Dr. Nichol Castro that is an extension of our phonological distance studies with L2 speakers of English (preprint) and one with Jonas Tan on detecting cognitive footprints of phonological network structure in speech errors (preprint).
  • We also have really interesting preliminary data on lexical-semantic norms for a set of core Singlish concepts. The preprint is forthcoming but in the meantime feel free to check out the data on this Shiny application!