LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, PROCESSING, AND PEDAGOGY LAB
We advance linguistic theory and improve language education

Established in 2015, LAPP Lab carries out behavioral and eye-tracking research. Our research is generously supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the journal Language Learning, and the PROSEED/TEL CMU fund.
PhD, MA, and BA/BS students take part in research, conference presentations, and journal publications. Grad students have gone on to tenure-track, post-doc, and industry positions. Undergrads have gone on to top graduate schools. Consider joining the lab!
LAPP Lab stimuli, data, and code are made freely available on the Open Science Framework. Because team science is the best science, LAPP Lab collaborates with other labs and is part of the Pittsburgh Cognitive Auditory Neuroscience (PCAN) network.
LAPP Lab takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the mechanisms and architecture underlying language acquisition and processing. Our work bridges linguistics, psychology, speech science, and education, and aims to contribute real-world pedagogical innovations that improve language teaching and learning. The lab has two standing research groups: Psychling, the behavioral psycholinguistics group, and StatsEye, the R and eye-tracking group. Interested in learning more about the lab? Getting copies of papers or materials? Gaining research experience? Or even participating in one of our studies? Contact the lab's director, Dr. Seth Wiener, for more information.
Dr. Wiener is an Associate Editor for the journal, Applied Psycholinguistics. He is mostly interested in dumplings, cereal, and comedy. Learn more about him on the podcast, "Lost in Citations."
Principal Investigator
Chisom joined the lab in 2020. She is interested in speech perception, second language acquisition, psycholinguistics training methods for language learning, and auditory neuroscience.
PhD student
Bota joined the lab in 2021. She is interested in reading, second language acquisition, language assessment, and mixed-methods research.
PhD student
Adam joined the lab in 2022. He is interested in understanding language learning and non-native speech perception through psycholinguistics, data analytics, and open science.
PhD student
Bianca joined the lab in 2023. She is interested in multilingual identity and ideology in second language acquisition.
PhD student
Mudita joined the lab in 2022. She is a Statistics and Machine Learning major. She is interested in the acquired learning patterns between monolinguals and multilinguals.
Undergraduate
Xiaohan joined the lab in 2022. She is a Statistics and Chinese Studies double major, and a Linguistics minor. She is interested in language data analysis and eye-tracking.
Undergraduate
Taylor joined the lab in 2023. He is a Computer Science and Linguistics double major. He is interested in language variation and phonetics.
Undergraduate
Andrew has not been seen in the lab for quite some time, and he really isn't known for his linguistics, but his heart is in the work.
Industrialist
It's a new year and a new website. I will post
occasional photos I took (The number of calories in that drink? It's a lot, eh?), quotes I found (“Smile, breathe and go slowly.” ― Thich Nhat Hanh), and interesting papers I came across
("Silence is perceived, not merely inferred" says Goh et al., 2023).
Be kinder this academic year,
Seth
Check out our poster "Switching between phonological biases is not free: evidence from a bilingual reconstruction task." The full paper is available to read here. [ˈɟɛkujɪ]
Check out our poster, An eye-tracking replication without an eye tracker: Capturing predictive sentence processing of accented speech via the internet.
Read about Chloe Sinagra, an undergraduate in LAPP Lab, and her co-authored COVID-19 study.