Carolyn Quam
 
 
 
 
 
 
21 September 2009
Download CV here: Quam_CV.pdf
Carolyn Quam CURRICULUM VITAE Department of Psychology Institute for Research in Cognitive Science University of Pennsylvania 3401 Walnut Street, Suite 400A Philadelphia, PA 19104-6228 cquam [at] psych [dot] upenn [dot] edu Research Interests: word learning and recognition, prosody, acquisition of phonology, corpus phonetics, cognitive development EDUCATION Ph.D. Psychology, University of Pennsylvania In progress Adviser: Daniel Swingley Dissertation committee: Delphine Dahan, John Trueswell Qualifying papers: What about pitch? Applying knowledge and methods from the study of consonants and vowels to the investigation of intonation, lexical pitch accent, and lexical tone Exploration of the computational modeling of sound category learning Certificate in Language and Communication Sciences In progress Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania Awarded by the Language and Communication Sciences – IGERT training program. Requirements fulfilled: interdisciplinary research project; three linguistics courses (phonetics I & II and computational linguistics); two semesters of mathematics training M.A. Psychology, University of Pennsylvania June 2005 Adviser: Daniel Swingley Master’s thesis: When English-learning children decide intonation is irrelevant for word learning: Developing sophistication by constraining word-learning hypotheses B.A. Psychology (music minor), Stanford University June 2004 June 2004 Adviser: Anne Fernald Honors thesis: “Where’s the dax?” The origins of the disambiguation response RESEARCH TRAINING Infant Language Center Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania Phonetics Laboratory Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania Center for Infant Studies Department of Psychology, Stanford University COMPUTER SKILLS Microsoft Office, Unix, R (for statistical computing), Python, Psyscope, Director, Habit, Tobii eye-tracking system, EyeLink eye-tracking system FOREIGN LANGUAGE EXPERIENCE Spanish: Fluency in spoken and written Spanish. Experience with Spanish includes 12 years in a Spanish Immersion program (Spanish spoken in the classroom by students and instructors throughout the school day; Bellevue School District, WA), AP Spanish language and literature courses, and a college course. Italian: One year of college instruction. AWARDS & GRANTS National Science Foundation IGERT Graduate Traineeship June 2007 Two-year fellowship to conduct interdisciplinary research in language and communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Norman Henry Anderson Graduate Fund Award May 2007 $1000 research grant awarded by the University of Pennsylvania Department of Psychology to one graduate student in experimental psychology. Funded by an anonymous donor. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship April 2005 Three-year fellowship to pursue the Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Invited Speaker, Stanford Alumni Association: Stanford in Seattle March 2004 Summer Research College, Stanford University Summer 2003 $3000 Undergraduate Research Opportunities grant, Stanford University 2002 National Merit Scholarship 2000–2004 TEACHING & ADVISING Research supervisor, Infant-directed Mandarin corpus project Fall 2008 – present Working with an undergraduate student to make and transcribe recordings of infant-directed Mandarin Chinese. Mentor, Big Brothers Big Sisters program October 2005 – present Advise a low-income West Philadelphia high school student both academically and personally; provide a positive example. Research adviser, Research Experience course Fall 2007 and Fall 2008 Advised four University of Pennsylvania undergraduates on two different research projects for Daniel Swingley’s Research Experience course. The first project investigated perception of the pitch cue to stress in English by adults and infants. The second project involved tagging utterances in the Brent corpus from the CHILDES database for pragmatic function. Instructor, The challenges and rewards of infant research Spring 2007 Sole responsibility for creating and teaching a “mini-seminar” for twenty University of Pennsylvania undergraduates. Established a curriculum and an evaluation strategy; taught four seminar meetings; advised students individually on their papers; graded papers. Teaching assistant to Paul Rozin Spring 2007 Psychology 001, University of Pennsylvania Teaching assistant to Delphine Dahan Spring 2006 Psychology of Language, University of Pennsylvania Teaching assistant to Anne Fernald 2004 Freshman seminar on language acquisition, Stanford University Peer Academic Advisor 2001-2002 As a college sophomore, advised a group of five Stanford freshmen on course selection and college life. ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICE Chair, Psycholinguistics session, Penn Linguistics Colloquium April 2009 Coordinator, Psychology department graduate applicant weekends Spring 2009 Worked with the Psychology Graduate Chair, an administrator, and a clinical student to arrange student hosts and schedule meetings with faculty for thirty prospective graduate students. PUBLICATIONS Quam, C., & Swingley, D. (in preparation). Development in children’s sensitivity to pitch as a cue to emotions. Quam, C., & Swingley, D. (in press). Phonological knowledge guides two-year-olds’ and adults’ interpretation of salient pitch contours in word learning. Journal of Memory and Language. Quam, C., Yuan, J., & Swingley, D. (2008). Relating intonational pragmatics to the pitch realizations of highly frequent words in English speech to infants. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Early, T., Portillo, A.L., & Quam, C. (2004). The search for an object begins at the verb: Rapid inferential word learning by two-year-old children. Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal, 3, 6-9 (Authors listed alphabetically; SURJ is a highly competitive, peer-reviewed journal). PRESENTATIONS Quam, C., & Swingley, D. (2009). English-learning children’s interpretation of pitch variation in their linguistic input. Child Phonology Conference, University of Texas at Austin. Quam, C., Swingley, D., & Park, J. (2009). Developmental change in preschoolers’ sensitivity to pitch as a cue to the speaker’s emotions. Society for Research in Child Development 2009 Biennial Meeting. (poster) Quam, C., Yuan, J., & Swingley, D. (2008). Relating intonational pragmatics to the pitch realizations of highly frequent words in English speech to infants. Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Quam, C. & Swingley, D. (2007). Phonological knowledge trumps salient local regularity in 2-year-olds’ word learning. Boston University Conference on Language Development, 32. (poster) Quam, C., Thorpe, K., & Fernald, A. (2005). The origin of “exclusionary learning”: A longitudinal study of online comprehension by infants from 14 to 18 months. Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting. (poster) Portillo, A.L., Early, T., Quam, C., Zangl, R., & Fernald, A. (2005). Young language learners use semantic knowledge of verbs to learn new object names. Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting. (poster) Fernald, A., Zangl, R., Early, T., Portillo, A.L., & Quam, C. (2004). Two-year-olds use verb information in rapid inferential learning of novel nouns. Boston University Conference on Language Development. Quam, C. (2004). “Where’s the dax?” The origins of the disambiguation response. Stanford Psychology Honors Convention. Quam, C. (2004). “Where’s the dax?” The origins of the disambiguation effect. Stanford Undergraduate Psychology Conference (a competitive, national conference). Fernald, A., Zangl, R., Early, T., Portillo, A.L., & Quam, C. (2004). Two year olds use verb information in rapid inferential learning of novel nouns. CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Early, T., Quam, C., & Portillo, A.L. (2003). The search for an object begins at the verb: Rapid inferential learning of new words by 2-year-old children. Symposium for Undergraduate Research in Progress. (poster)