Graduate Students

Casey Ferrara

Casey Ferrara

I am interested in the intersection of language and cognition and exploring their overlap through studying sign and spoken language development, the role of gesture in sign vs. spoken languages, variability in language outcomes, and the effects of early linguistic environment on cognition.

Email: caseyferrara@uchicago.edu

Anjana Lakshmi

Anjana Lakshmi

I am interested in social category and person perception information that people represent in / draw from human faces and non-verbal gestures. My current and future projects include face representations of social groups based on group membership as well as within-group status differences, and the implicit communication of stereotype content through non-verbal gestures.

Email: anjanachandran@uchicago.edu

Xiaohan (Hannah) Guo

Xiaohan (Hannah) Guo

I am broadly interested in how students learn, think, and apply knowledge in novel situations. My current research examines the mechanisms behind gestures that promote STEM learning and the development of image memory among children.

Email: hannahguo@uchicago.edu

Michelle Madlansacay

Michelle Madlansacay

I am interested in exploring the relationship between language and learning, and identifying the verbal and nonverbal characteristics of human language that can be considered universal. My current work investigates the role of parent interactions in the communicative development of deaf and hearing children. 

Email: mmadlansacay@uchicago.edu

Emilia Szmyrgala

Emilia Szmyrgala

I am a doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Human Development. I completed my undergraduate studies at University of California, Los Angeles in 2018 where I obtained my Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and minor in Applied Developmental Psychology. Before coming to University of Chicago, I was an educator in Chicago Public Schools for three years. Broadly, my research interests include trauma-informed teaching practices and how schools can support oral language development among young children. I am supporting the Getting on Track project, which is developing a pre-k oral language and literacy assessment to support teachers in understanding their students’ oral language and literacy skills.

Email: eszmyrgala@uchicago.edu

Üliana Solovieva

Üliana Solovieva

Broadly, I am interested in children’s development of social biases, nonverbal communication, and person perception. Specifically, how children may internalize, endorse and respond to stereotypes beyond spoken words – through gesture and face nonverbal modalities. My work also explores the mechanisms behind impression formation in children and adults.

Email: uliana@uchicago.edu

Abby Clements

Abby Clements

I am interested in the neural basis of language and how it is affected (or not affected) by modality. I’m also interested in concepts and cognition more broadly and how they change over the course of development. I am specifically interested in Protactile sign language. 

Email: arclements@uchicago.edu

Marine Wang

Marine Wang

I’m broadly interested in exploring children’s understanding towards multimodal information during conversations and learning processes. My work also focuses on the neural and psychophysiological mechanisms underpinning these cognitive processing activities.

Email: marinewang@uchicago.edu

Irene Bolumar Martinez

Irene Bolumar Martinez

I am working on extending the knowledge on how polysemy works by examining speakers utterances and spontaneous gestures. To do so, my project centers on perception verbs while combining methods from corpus linguistics and multimodal research using the NewsScape audio-visual database. 

Email: irenebolumar@uchicago.edu