Yangchen Roy
Linguist. Researcher. Teacher.
I am a linguist fascinated by sentence structure and meaning and how these are generated and processed in the human mind-brain, particularly in the mind-brain of infants and children, given the sparse and noisy language data they are exposed to (unlike, say, an LLM). I study what children’s journey toward adult language reveals about what is and is not uniquely human in our capacity for language, and what the intersection between general cognition and language cognition is. I am also interested in how research in linguistics can be harnessed to build language tools and games for multi-lingual, second and foreign language learning. Apart from this, I document and write grammars of lesser-known and under-resourced languages.
Currently, I am a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin on the European Research Council Synergy Grant project “Realizing Leibniz’s Dream: Child Languages as a Mirror of the Mind”. I trained as a linguist at Jawaharlal Nehru University and The English and Foreign Languages University Hyderabad.
My academic CV can be found here. For more on my past research, see my research statement from 2024, and the abstract of my 2023 JNU PhD dissertation. My teaching-learning statement is here. Feel free to get in touch via email at yangchen.roy@hu-berlin.de.