Daniel Swingley

(and his Netscape-compatible web page!)

Professor and Chair -- no, just former chair as of summer 2023. Thanks everyone!

University of Pennsylvania
Department of Psychology
425 S. University Ave
Levin Building
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
USA

Phone: 215-898-0334
Fax: 215-746-6848
E-mail: swingley [apenstaartje] psych.upenn.edu

Note: If you want a different photo, try this which was taken by a pika in Denali Park

Teaching:
Intro. to Experimental Psychology (Psych 1); about 1x/year
Cognitive Development (Psych 2377; some spring semesters);
Proseminar in Cognitive Development (Psych 600-302; offered every 3 years);
Topics in Development: Language Acquisition (Psych 280)
Mentored Research (Psych 4998; offered all the time)

Courses I may do again one day:
Perceptual Learning (Psych 211/739)
Applied Biophysics: Resurrection of the Minor Rodents (Bio 831)
Coffee Tastes Better After Passing Through a Civet, Relative to Broccoli (Bio 738)
Barky Spice: How Cinnamon Changed History, and Waffles (Hist 122)

Research Interests: How children learn language, focusing on infants and toddlers. Word recognition and lexical knowledge in infants and young children; lexical and phonological categorization. Perceptual experiments with infants, acoustic measurements of infant-directed speech, statistical analyses of infant-directed speech corpora, perceptual category learning in adults.

Lab alums: (whose inter-whereabouts are known to this office)
Sho Tsuji (LSCP Paris / RIKEN)
Frans Adriaans (Utrecht)
Elika Bergelson (Harvard)
Suzanne van der Feest (CUNY)
Gary Lupyan (UW-Madison)
Sarah Creel (UCSD)
Carolyn Quam (Portland State)
Chandan Narayan (York)
Martijn Goudbeek (Tilburg)

press announcements and other news

  • Elika Bergelson is the 2020 winner of the International Congress on Infant Studies' Early Career Contribution Award!

  • BBC's 'The Why Factor' interviews me about Lupyan & Swingley and why we talk to ourselves. Matthew Sweet did a great job!

  • Director of the NIH blogs the work of recent lab PhD Elika Bergelson, who has been named one of Forbes' "30 under 30" scientists!

  • Elika Bergelson, now at Harvard University, has been granted an "exceptional early career scientist" award (an NIH DP-5 Early Independence Award) which will give her the resources to continue her work on how infants learn language. Bravo Elika!

    • Q to self: where does absurd newspaper filler material come from? Why, from the pages of QJEP of course!
  • Columbus Dispatch, June 2014

    • WHYY public radio's Maiken Scott interviews Elika Bergelson and Daniel Swingley on the Newsworks program, to talk about research reported in PNAS in Feb 2012.
  • download interview (~10MB)

    • Report on Bergelson & Swingley on France 2's news program:
  • link to interview
    • Fais gaffe: not everything the announcer says is true of the research. He was enthusiastic, though.

    Shoutout to Lupyan & Swingley in the NYT Magazine. Nota bene: our study was about finding something in a complex scene in front of you (like a supermarket aisle), not about remembering where you put your keys.
  • webarchive file
  • link to New York Times
    • .