Director
Dorit Bar-On
Professor, Philosophy, University of Connecticut
(formerly Zachary Smith Distinguished Professor, Philosophy, UNC-Chapel Hill)
Professor Bar-On specializes in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology. She also has research interests in metaethics. In her book Speaking My Mind: Expression and Self-Knowledge (Oxford Nov 2004), she develops a neo-expressivist view of first-person authority, drawing on insights from philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, theory of action, and epistemology. In recent years, she has been working on the topic of continuities between linguistic and non-linguistic communication and expressive behavior. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Expression, Communication, and the Origins of Meaning, under contract with Oxford University Press. She also has a forthcoming article jointly written with ECOM member Drew Johnson in an international volume on epistemology. Additional works in progress: a book on expression and self-knowledge (with Crispin Wright), a book on truth (with Keith Simmons), and a manuscript on neo-expressivism.
Distinguished ECOM Member
Ruth G. Millikan
Professor, Philosophy, University of Connecticut
Ruth Millikan's research interests span many topics in the philosophy of biology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and ontology. The unity is in method rather than subject matter. The aspects of these fields that interest her are continuous with relevant scientific work and with the philosophy of science. She has been especially interested in applications of evolutionary theory in these areas, and in the ontology that makes study of biological entities possible.
Dr. Marie Coppola
Associate Professor, Psychology, Linguistics, Director of the Language Creation Laboratory, University of Connecticut
Dr. Coppola investigates the contributions of the learner and the environment by studyinglanguages created de novo by individuals (homesign gesture systems) and communities (e.g., Nicaraguan Sign Language). She also investigates the relationship between language development and cognitive development in the areas of number cognition, social cognition, and executive function. She also co-edits the Sign Language Typology book series.
Inge-Marie Eigsti
Associate Professor, Psychology, University of Connecticut
Prof. Eigsti’s work addresses a fundamental challenge of autism spectrum disorders (ASD): Mapping complex behavioral constructs, such as social communication difficulties, onto mechanistic processes in the brain. We do this, in part, by measuring the role of low-level (and particularly non-social) cognitive processes, such as working memory and auditory processing, that can be linked to genetic, neurophysiological or neuroanatomical domains, and that influence socio-communicative behavior. The aim is to better understand the pathology of ASD by linking research across molecular, neurofunctional, and behavioral levels, using a variety of behavioral and neuroimaging techniques. One major project focuses on adult outcomes in ASD.
Mitchell Green
Professor, Philosophy, University of Connecticut
Mitch Green's specializations are in Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, and Aesthetics. His current research interests include evolutionary biology of communication, speech acts and their role in communication, empathy, self-knowledge, self-expression, and attitude ascription. He is the current editor-in-Chief of the journal Philosophia. His latest article ‘Dimensions of Commitment & the Abuse of Illocutionary Norms in Public Discourse,’ is forthcoming in Topoi.
Harry van der Hulst
Professor, Linguistics, University of ConnecticutProfessor van der Hulst specialized in the study of phonology in both spoken and sign languages, with over 170 articles and 29 edited volumes in these areas. Recent work includes Asymmetries in vowel harmony – A representational approach (2018, Oxford University Press) and two books that are to appear: Radical CV Phonology – a theory of segmental and syllabic structure (2020, Edinburgh University Press) and A mind for language – The innateness debate (2020, Cambridge University Press). Work on two handbooks (on Vowel Harmony and on The history of phonology (both for OUP) is ongoing. Van der Hulst is Editor-in-Chief of The Linguistic Review and co-editor of the series ‘Studies in generative grammar’ (both with Mouton de Gruyter). Beyond phonology, he has interests in the study of gesture, language evolution and form-meaning relations in all forms of semiotic systems.
William G. Lycan
Distinguished Visiting Professor, Philosophy, University of Connecticut
and William Rand Kenan Professor Emeritus, Philosophy, UNC-Chapel Hill
William G. Lycan specializes in philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, but also contributes to epistemology. He is the author of: Logical Form in Natural Language(MIT, 1984); Knowing Who(with Steven Boer) (MIT, 1986); Consciousness(MIT, 1987); Judgement and Justification(Cambridge, 1988); Modality and Meaning(Kluwer, 1994); Consciousness and Experience(MIT, 1996); Real Conditionals(Oxford, 2001); On Evidence in Philosophy (Oxford, 2019) and 190-odd articles on assorted topics. He has a new paper entitled "What Is It We Touch?," forthcoming in Sensory Individuals (Oxford).
Emily Myers
Professor, Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences; Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut
Dr. Myers studies the brain processes that support language comprehension, with a particular emphasis on the ways that listeners flexibly adapt as they learn new languages or encounter novel listening situations. Her work considers the ways these processes operate in typical, healthy individuals, and how the comprehension process goes awry in language disorders such as aphasia. Work in her lab is funded by the NIH (NIDCD) and NSF.
Dr. Naigles studies children’s language acquisition, particularly across languages and with special populations. Her current research focuses on the interacting roles of linguistic input and linguistic predispositions in the acquisition of word meanings and sentence structures in both typically developing children and children who have been diagnosed with autism. She is the editor of Innovative Investigations of Language in Autism Spectrum Disorder (2017) NY: APA Books/Walter deGruyter and just received an R01 titled ‘Early Predictors to School Age Language: Individual and Interactional Child and Parent Factors’
Julian J. Schloeder
Assistant Research Professor, Philosophy, University of Connecticut
Julian Schloeder’s research spans the philosophies of logic, language, mind and metaethics. They engage with these topics from a pragmatist perspective, focusing on the social purposes and normative properties of the relevant concepts. Their current research deals in particular with expressivism in metaethics, the (more general) use of speech acts to express attitudes, a pragmatist analysis of dispositions, and with explaining the mental attitudes by appealing to the usefulness of commonsense psychology.
Associate Professor, Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences Director of the Auditory Brain Research Lab University of Connecticut
Dr. Erika Skoe studies how the brain processes sound, through the integration of neuro-electric, ecological, fieldwork, and serum-based measures of hearing. She has a particular interest in how experience shapes the auditory system and its connections to language and cognition across the lifespan.
William Snyder
Professor, Linguistics, University of Connecticut
Dr. Snyder investigates the biological basis of the human capacity for language. He works within the Principles-and-Parameters (P&P) framework, positing that grammatical differences across languages are both abstract (i.e., not tied directly to individual surface constructions) and narrowly constrained (allowing only a small number of options). Dr. Snyder is the author of Child Language: The Parametric Approach (Oxford), and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics.
Whitney Tabor
Associate Professor of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut
Whit Tabor is interested in the tension between humans’ need for order and predictability, on the one hand, and their need for flexibility and novelty on the other. He has investigated this tension by studying grammar, language change, language processing, and, most recently, the emergence of coordination in groups
Eiling Yee
Assistant Professor of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut
Dr. Yee investigates how meaning is represented in the human mind by studying the cognitive and neural representations of concepts. An area of particular interest in the Yee Lab is the relationship between context (e.g., perceptual information and experiences) and language and/or conceptual processing. Dr. Yee also has interests in spoken word recognition and language processing more broadly.
Dr.Yee regularly teaches seminars on the Psychology of Language. Please contact her for more details.