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

• September 2026:
  • Dr. Andrew Wang joins the LCL as a post-doc from the University of Melbourne. Welcome Andrew!
  • Cynthia was featured in a Channel 8 news segment and wrote an op-ed on the value of word associations.
  • We have a couple of publications featuring lab alumni! Check out Timothy’s paper on Singapore English phonological networks and Rankie’s paper on word frequency norms for Singapore English.