Welcome to our incoming Ph.D. students!

We are excited to introduce our incoming Ph.D. cohort, who will be joining the department in the fall of 2024! Please give them all a warm welcome – we’re so glad you’re joining us!

Below are the students’ self-provided profiles:

Tilden "Tilly” Brooks

I come to Stanford from Yale University, where I received a BA in linguistics in 2023 and where I am concurrently pursuing a JD. I am broadly interested in two areas: the language of law and the law of language. I focus both on the effects of law and policy decisions on marginalized linguistic communities (the law of language) and the application of linguistic theories, research methods, and tools to interpretive legal processes (the language of law). My linguistic interests are concentrated in formal semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics, though I have a background in historical linguistics and a growing interest in computational methods.

Junseon Hong

I received my B.A. and M.A. in English Language and Literature from Seoul National University. My research interests lie in formal semantics and pragmatics, particularly how conventional meaning interacts with discourse context in non-canonical sentence forms. My thesis investigates the semantics and pragmatics of English rising declaratives, and I look forward to broadening my scope to encompass other languages and exploring other non-canonical sentence forms in my future work.

Aslı Kuzgun

I completed my BA in English Language Teaching at İstanbul Bilgi University, where I met the field of linguistics and went on to earn an MA in Linguistics at Boğaziçi University in İstanbul, Turkey. I am mainly interested in the morpho-syntax of Turkic languages with a focus on case, agreement, and nominalizations. I am also an NLP enthusiast with research and professional experience in the development of various linguistic corpora in Turkish and English. I am looking forward to combining my two interests together at Stanford by continuing research in theoretical linguistics while equipping myself with the computational tools available at Stanford.

Kim Tien Nguyen

I grew up in Vietnam and earned my BA in Linguistics from Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany. In my BA thesis and a subsequent study, I experimentally investigated the pragmatic effects of topicality encoded by intonation and sentence structure on scope interpretation in German. Alongside pursuing my primary research interests in semantics/pragmatics and psycholinguistics, I also look forward to delving into computational linguistics during my graduate studies. By combining insights from formal linguistic analysis, psycholinguistic experimentation, and computational methods, I seek to explore language production and comprehension as fundamentally probabilistic processes. I am very excited to embark on my PhD journey and become a part of the Stanford community!

Nathan Roll

I'm a Bay Area local who graduated with a B.A. in Linguistics and Economics from UC Santa Barbara in 2023. (My senior thesis tested how speech-to-text models can be modified to automatically detect intonation units in conversational speech.) I've since focused on developing variation-robust language technologies as a research assistant at the University of Cambridge while also working as a freelance data scientist. At Stanford, I'm excited to collaborate on projects related to sociophonetics, prosody, and NLP, while also exploring connections to cognitive science and economics.

Yuka Tatsumi 

I graduated from Middlebury College in May 2022 with degrees in Neuroscience (major) and Linguistics (minor). For the past two years, I have been working as a lab manager at the Center for Language Science at Pennsylvania State University. Broadly, I am interested in acoustics, phonetics, and psycholinguistics. Since my sophomore year, I have been intrigued by the perception and production of emotional prosody, and to what extent it is universal and language/culture-specific. I am excited to continue exploring this topic through various approaches—behavioral, computational, and neural—at Stanford. My other research projects include: the production effect in lexical memory processing, cross-linguistic comparison of pragmatic particle acquisition, and acoustic adaptation in interactive speech. I am thrilled to be joining the Stanford Linguistics community!