Sathvik Nair
Mika Braginsky
Mika Braginsky
Description: Here's some info about me!
Hi! I’m Jess and I’m a graduate student at UW-Madison in the Infant Learning Lab ! I graduated from UC Berkeley in 2020 with a B.A. in Cognitive Science. As an undergrad, I worked as an RA with Prof. Mahesh Srinivasan and Dr. Stephan Meylan in the Language and Cognitive Development Lab . During my postbacc, I was the Lab Manager for the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford University
I’m most excited when studying how humans learn to communicate and interact with one another. I’m also curious about how words and meanings are generated and how they shift and evolve through communication. Broadly, I’m interested in the intersection between semantics, pragmatics, and the acquisition of the two. I like to approach these questions with computational models, cleverly designed experiments, and publicly available resources and datasets.
I have a few primary lines of active work: 1) exploring toddlers’ understanding of communicative acts in ambiguous contexts, 2) tracking social dynamics during complex coordination and communication games, and 3) measuring the prevalence of lexical ambiguity or colexification in child language environments. I hope all of these projects will help us better understand how and why we use language the way we do.
Sathvik Nair
Mika Braginsky
Mika Braginsky