Are you interested in working with me? Does my research sound exciting and interesting? Are you wondering if I'm the advisor, and this is the department, for you? If so, you've come to the right place!
So, first of all, let's start with what I do: Most of my research involves conducting experiments in which participants communicate using artificial languages, or have to construct new “ laboratory languages” from scratch. The point is to try to learn about change and variation in natural languages by looking at something in the lab that resembles natural language, but is smaller and easier to mess with. The ideal candidate has a strong interest in doing the same, a strong background in the study of language, and some research experience. Now, of course, not everyone checks all these boxes, so which ones are crucial?
Well, if you're interested in language change and variation but you have no interest in experimental approaches, then I'm probably not be the advisor for you! So are you interested in experiments? You don't need to have tons of experience in conducting them, but you at least need to have some idea of how they work and a genuine interest in learning how to conduct them well.
Second, do you know what cultural evolution is? This is the least important one. It's actually fine if you don't know much about it. (Most people don't.) But sometimes people get a bit misled by the term; and it turns out that they thought they wanted to work with me on the basis of that, but actually don't. Cultural evolution is most easily defined in contrast to biological evolution, which is about change in gene frequencies over generations. Cultural evolution is basically about change in the distribution of cultural entities over time; in the context of language the relevant entities might be phonemes, morphemes, words, syntactic constructions etc. That's what I'm interested in studying: language change and variation (through a somewhat evolutionary lens), along with questions of where language comes from and why it is as it is. Is that true of you too?
Third, are you actually interested in language and have you studied it before? This is quite important. By far the clearest route to being advised by me is to apply to the Linguistics Department at Penn. (While I am a member of the Psychology Graduate Group, I am not a Psychology faculty member at Penn and am much more likely to advise students in Linguistics.) You're unlikely to be competitive in applying to Linguistics if you don't have training in linguistics or the study of language in some other discipline (such as psychology of language, philosophy of language, or computational linguistics). You also need to genuinely want to be in Linguistics! Do you want to spend two years taking classes on things like syntax and phonology, and to spend several years longer among people who are really into these things?
Fourth, there are a few things I get asked about quite often but am not very interested in working on. For instance, I'm not very interested in working on the linguistic relativity hypothesis (the hypothesis that the language a person speaks exercises a significant influence on their perception of the world). I'm also not especially interested in working on internet memes (unless there's a particularly interesting connection with language evolution).
All these things can essentially be summed up as follows: Are you genuinely interested in studying language change and variation by using interesting experimental methods?
If your answer to that question is an enthusiastic yes, then please do get in touch now! Please include the codeword “penguin” in your email. That way I'll know that you've read this page carefully. (If you neither mention penguins nor seem to be a good candidate, I reserve the right to ignore your email. But if that's not the case, and I seem to have missed your email, feel free to follow up!)
