Karaman Language & Cognition Lab — Texas A&M University–Kingsville
bida kupa dogo latu bida dogo kupa latu bida latu kupa dogo latu bida dogo kupa…
Speech doesn’t come with spaces. We study how learners put them in.
Nobody pauses between words when they talk. Infants still find the words, and adults still find them in a language they have never heard. Our lab asks how, what kind of memory keeps the answer around, and why some learners get there faster than others.
The line above is the kind of stream we play in the lab. Four words, no pauses, no stress to help you. The only reliable clue is which syllable tends to follow which — and that clue alone is enough for an eight-month-old.
What the lab is
We are a language and cognition lab in the Department of Psychology at Texas A&M University–Kingsville, directed by Dr. Ferhat Karaman. We run behavioral experiments with infants, children and adults to understand how linguistic structure is learned from experience and how it survives in memory.
Most of our work starts from statistical learning: the finding that learners track how often sounds, syllables and words co-occur, and use those regularities to break speech apart. We follow that thread outward — into stress and phonotactics, into memory and forgetting, into individual differences among bilingual and multilingual learners, and most recently into what happens to memory when some of the information arrives from an AI.
We are a Hispanic-Serving Institution lab, and most of our research assistants are undergraduates doing research for the first time. Training them is part of the work, not a side effect of it.
What we study
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Finding words in continuous speech
How learners use transitional probabilities, lexical stress and the sound patterns of their native language to pull words out of a stream — and what happens when those cues point in different directions.
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Memory for what was learned
Segmenting a word is not the same as keeping it. We study how long newly segmented forms last, what makes them decay, and what brings them back.
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Learners who differ
Verbal short-term memory, working memory and native-language skill predict who learns what. We test these predictors in monolingual, bilingual and second-language learners.
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Remembering in a world with AI
When an answer comes from a chatbot rather than a book or your own head, what do you remember, how confident are you, and who benefits? A newer line of work in the lab.
News
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Julie Cisneros joins the lab as a graduate student.
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Our abstract on statistical word segmentation in natural speech was accepted for a poster at the Psychonomic Society meeting in San Diego, November 19–22.
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Poster with the UCLA team at BUCLD: five-month-olds fall back on phonotactics when transitional probabilities are unreliable.
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Three papers out, in Developmental Psychology, Cognitive Science and Journal of Linguistics Research.
Looking for a research lab?
We take undergraduate research assistants every semester, and no prior experience is required — only curiosity and a steady schedule.