MindCORE Postdoctoral Fellow, Starting Fall 2021

Tyler uses tools from Psycholinguistics and Psychophysics to ask what linguistic meanings are and how they’re acquired. 

Before coming to Penn, Tyler received a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Maryland and a BA in Cognitive Science from Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on logical words like “every” and “most”: what do they mean, how are they acquired by children, and how do they relate to cognitive systems outside of language? To answer these questions, he makes use of psycholinguistic experiments with adults and children, psychophysical modeling of behavior, and corpus analysis of child-directed speech. A theme in this line of work has been that linguistic meanings can offer surprisingly precise instructions to cognitive systems and that the particulars of these instructions are shared across speakers. You can learn more about the details of his research here: tylerknowlton.com. Outside of research, Tyler is actively involved in public outreach. He previously chaired the Maryland Language Science Center’s committee on community outreach and organized events aimed at introducing middle- and high-school students to the scientific study of human language and related career paths.