معرفی
Elika Bergelson is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She leads the Bergelson Lab (BLAB), part of Harvard's Laboratory for Developmental Studies, focusing on infant language acquisition. Her research examines how infants learn words by studying both cognitive mechanisms and environmental input through naturalistic and lab-based methods.
Her research interests center on infant language acquisition, cognitive development, and word learning, with a focus on how language input, social interaction, and sensory experience shape early linguistic knowledge. She explores word comprehension, phonological and semantic representations, and the role of variability in talker and wordform input. Her lab has pioneered large-scale cross-linguistic studies and expanded into atypical development, including language acquisition in blind and deaf infants.
The 15 most recent publications reflect a strong trend in naturalistic data collection, cross-linguistic comparison, and methodological innovation, particularly in using LENA recordings and open science practices. Topics include acoustic and talker variability, vocabulary development in sensory-impaired children, remote infant testing, and the reliability of speech analysis tools.
Dr. Bergelson is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusivity in research and lab recruitment. She actively promotes open science, public outreach, and policy applications of developmental science.
She has mentored numerous students and researchers, though specific names are not listed. Her work is supported by collaborative grants and large-scale interdisciplinary projects.
The Bergelson Lab employs methods including eye-tracking, EEG, audio discrimination tasks, and corpus analysis. It continues the SEEDLingS project and collects longitudinal data from infants with sensory impairments. The lab maintains open repositories on GitHub and emphasizes reproducibility and transparency in research.
