Mina Hirzel

I am a sixth year graduate student in the Linguistics Department at the University of Maryland, and a Research Fellow at the Maryland Language Science Center. I’m advised by Ellen Lau and Jeffrey Lidz.

I study first language acquisition, with a focus on syntax, semantics and sentence processing. Topics of interest: wh-questions, argument structure, verb learning, island constraints, syntactic bootstrapping, modality, prediction

Before coming to UMD, I studied acquisition of noun-noun compounds and contrastive focus/reduplication at the Language Acquisition Lab with Alan Munn and Cristina Schmitt at Michigan State University. I was also fortunate to work in the Speech Perception-Production Lab under the supervision of Dr. Laura Dilley, where I learned a lot about speech and prosody.

I’m one of six students in my vibrant linguistics cohort at UMD: Sigwan Thivierge, Anouk Dieuleveut, Aaron Doliana, Rodrigo Ranero, Tyler Knowlton.

Last updated September 2021.