Daniel Swingley
Room 362, Levin Building
425 S. University Ave.
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.
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]
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.