profile picture

Erin C

- Research Program Mentor

PhD candidate at Duke University

Expertise

language acquisition, psycholinguistics, corpus analysis, child development

Bio

I study how infants who are born Deaf or blind learn words from the world around them. I think this is such a cool topic because it shows how flexible human brains are for learning language. Working with babies is often challenging, but it makes research fun -- who else gets to use slinkies at work? Outside of science, I like to be active! I like to rock climb and do circus arts (like flying trapeze!).

Project ideas

Project ideas are meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.

Cockadoodle doo! How do kids learn animal words?

Why do children seem to learn animal sounds ("meow") before they learn animals names ("cat"). We'll study how parents talk to children about animals and when children learn words for different animals.

Coding skills

R, Matlab (EEGlab, ERPlab), Git

Languages I know

Spanish, intermediate; American Sign Language, intermediate

Credentials

Education

Towson University
BA Bachelor of Arts (2018)
Speech language pathology, Deaf studies, Disability studies
Duke University
MA Master of Arts (2021)
Psychology & Neuroscience
Duke University
PhD Doctor of Philosophy candidate
Cognition & Cognitive Neuroscience

Interested in working with expert mentors like Erin?

Apply now