CCL Current Personnel

Aaron Mitchel - Graduate Student

Jason Wark - Primate Lab Manager

Allison Allmon - Research Assistant

Nick Dussias - Research Assistant

Former Members of the Lab

Sara Affalter

Katie Barrett

Mark Basile

Jenna Beckwith

Mike Blaguszewski

Ariel Bloom

Jill Boelter

Blake Goll

Dana Helsel

Rebecca Sammak

Celina Troutman

Jessica Wilson

Dan Weiss Ph.D
djw21@psu.edu

I am interested in the mechanisms underlying language acquisition and the extent to which they are shared with other species. For example, there have been many recent studies suggesting that statistical learning mechanisms may play a fundamental role in allowing language learners to determine the basic components and structures of their language (e.g., which sounds in the language are contrastive, which units constitute words, etc.). Interestingly, recent research has shown that many of the basic abilities demonstrated by humans are also available to nonhuman primates. This suggests that the mechanisms, at least in their most basic form, are not unique for language learning (though they may have been coopted for that purpose). Over the past few years, my research has focused on a detailed exploration of how these mechanisms operate. Specifically, I've been interested in the types of computations that can be performed by learners, the computational primitives that comprise the calculations, and the types of generalizations that follow learning.

Another research interest I intend to pursue is the study of animal communication. In order to understand how language systems differ from other forms of communication, it is critical to understand the types of communication other species are capable of and how those abilities develop. In addition, I think it will be important to determine how nonhumans perform on learning tasks that involve conspecific communication as opposed to making comparisons with humans based solely on their perception of a heterospecific form of communication.

Recently, I have been branching out to the study of motor control in nonhumans. See the Primate Lab page for more details on this project...or better yet, drop me an email.

Link to Dan's c.v.

Academic Biography

I earned a BA in psychology at University of Maryland (still love Terps basketball). I earned my MA and PhD in the psychology department at Harvard University studying animal communication in Marc Hauser's lab. Subsequently, I spent three years at University of Rochester as a postdoc working with Dick Aslin and Elissa Newport studying language acquisition. At Penn State University, I'm in the process of setting up three laboratories in order to perform comparative studies of language acquisition and communication (one lab for studying human infants, one for human adults, and one for cotton-top tamarins, a small New World primate).

Relevant publications:

Weiss, D.J. & Gerfen, C. (2006) Language segmentation in a bilingual environment.
Proceedings of the 30th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development

Weiss, D.J. & Gerfen, C. (In review) Language segmentation in a bilingual environment.

Weiss, D.J., Gerfen, C., Mitchell, A., & Rizzo, W. (In review) The role of pauses and
statistics in word segmentation: A new perspective on colliding cues. To be submitted to Psychological Science

Newport, E, Weiss, D.J., Wonnacott, L., and Aslin, R.N. (in prep) Statistical learning in
speech by infants and adults: Syllables or segments?