TEAM
Alon Hafri
Lab Director
Assistant Professor of Linguistics & Cognitive Science
Alon (he/him/his) is interested in how language encodes the structure of scenes (e.g., what is in or on what) and events (e.g., who did what to whom), as well as the perceptual processes that extract such information. He earned his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019, where he worked with John Trueswell and Russell Epstein. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University in the labs of Chaz Firestone, Mick Bonner, and Barbara Landau in the Departments of Psychological & Brain Sciences and Cognitive Science. When not doing science, he enjoys making soup, soap, and beer, and only rarely confuses the three.
Xiaoyi Tang
Graduate Student
Xiaoyi (she/her/hers) is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at University of Delaware. She is interested in psycholinguistics; and specifically, in developing experimental measures to study cross-linguistic event perception and linguistic encoding. Before coming to UD, she earned her M.S. in Educational Linguistics and worked as a graduate assistant at the University of Pennsylvania. When not doing research, she likes doing yoga and pilates (although not at the same time).
Luc De Nardi
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Luc (he/him/his) is a second-year linguistics major with interests in historical and computational linguistics. He joined the lab in Fall 2022, and as such, he is the lab’s very first member. He is currently working on exploring whether words that encode abstract conceptual distinctions like “boundedness” might share sound patterns within and across languages. Luc speaks French and Spanish, and is also a music aficionado: he plays French horn in the UD marching band (which is audible all the way from the Newark reservoir, as attested by Alon).
The Perception and Language Lab