Yangchen Roy

I am a linguist fascinated by sentence structure and meaning and how these are generated in the human mind-brain, particularly in the mind-brain of infants and children. I study what children’s journey toward adult language tells us about the uniquely human capacity for language, and its intersection with general cognitive mechanisms. I am also interested in how child language research can be harnessed to build language tools and games for elementary and adult language classrooms of multilinguals. Apart from this, I document and write grammars of lesser-known, endangered, and under-resourced languages. The languages I usually draw insights from are ones spoken in a highly linguistically diverse part of the world — the South Asian subcontinent. Most are either undocumented, or understudied in experimental and applied linguistics.

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher on the European Research Council Synergy Grant project “Realizing Leibniz’s Dream: Child Languages as a Mirror of the Mind”. My academic CV can be found here. For more on my research, see my research statement from 2024, and the abstract of my 2023 PhD dissertation. My teaching-learning statement is here.