Daniel Swingley

Professor
AB, Cognitive Science, Brown University and Queen's College Oxford;
Ph.D., Psychology, Stanford University
Office Location: 
Room 362, Levin Building, 425 S. University Ave.
Email: 
swingley@psych.upenn.edu
Phone: 
215-898-0334
Website: 
http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~swingley/
Research Interests: 
Developmental Psychology
Language and Communication
Memory and Learning
Perception
 
Specific Research Areas: 

Word recognition, word learning, and lexical representation in infants and young children

 
Research Synopsis: 
My research focuses on word recognition, word learning, and lexical representation in infants and young children. Current projects include perceptual experiments with infants, statistical and acoustic analyses of infant-directed speech corpora, and perceptual learning studies of adults.
 
My lab takes a cognitive science, engineering approach to understanding early language acquisition. We ask: what is the nature of the information in the child's language environment, how do children make sense of this informaiton in real time, and how does this lead to successful learning during development? The work in the lab typically involves minor programming, phonetics, and experimental design, along with problem-solving of many sorts. We often try to do things that we do not see other labs in this research area doing. If this sounds exciting to you, apply to Penn!
 
Professor Daniel Swingley will not be considering new graduate students for admission for Fall 2025.
 
Selected Publications: 

Beech, C., & Swingley, D. (in press/2023). Relating referential clarity and phonetic clarity in infant-directed speech. Developmental Science.

Beech, C., & Swingley, D. (2023). Consequences of phonological variation for algorithmic word segmentation. Cognition 235, 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105401

Swingley, D. (2022). Infants' learning of speech sounds and word forms. Chapter, Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon (Eds., Papafragou, Gleitman, & Trueswell). Oxford.

Swingley, D. (2019). Learning phonology from surface distributions, considering Dutch and English vowel duration. Language Learning and Development. 15, (1-18). 10.1080/15475441.2018.156927 

Swingley, D., & Alarcon, C. (2018). Lexical learning may contribute to phonetic learning in infants: a corpus analysis of maternal Spanish. Cognitive Science, 42, 1618-1641, 10.1111/cogs.12620.

Swingley, D., & Algayres, R. (2024). Computational modeling of the segmentation of sentence stimuli from an infant word-finding study. Cognitive Science

Swingley, D., & Humphrey, C. (2018). Quantitative linguistic predictors of infants' learning of specific English words. Child Development, 89, 1247-1267, 10.1111/cdev.12731. 

Bergelson, E., & Swingley, D. (2018). Young infants' word comprehension given an unfamiliar talker or altered pronunciations.  Child Development. 10.1111/cdev.12888
 
Swingley, D., & Humphrey, C. (2017). Quantitative linguistic predictors of infants' learning of specific English words. Child Development, 10.1111/cdev.12731.
 
Swingley, D. (2016). Two-year-olds interpret novel phonological neighbors as familiar words. Developmental Psychology, doi 10.1037/dev0000114, 52, 1011-1023.
 
Bergelson, E., & Swingley, D. (2013). The acquisition of abstract words by young infants. Cognition, 127, 391-397.
 
Bergelson, E., & Swingley, D. (Feb. 2012). At 6 to 9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 109, 3253-3258.
Courses Taught: 

PSYC 001 Introduction to Psychology
PSYC 281 Cognitive Development (undergraduate)
PSYC 399 Individual Empirical Research
PSYC 481 Special Topics in Development (Language acquisition)
PSYC 600 Cognitive Development (graduate)

Appointments: 
Linguistics Graduate Group
 
Advisees: 
Caroline Beech [Psychology Graduate Student]