Benjamin Zinszer

Background

About Benjamin Zinszer

My research combines psycholinguistic experiments, brain imaging, and machine learning models to explore how the meanings of words gradually emerge in the brains of language learners of all ages. I'm especially interested in how these meanings are similar or different between groups of people who speak different languages, have different learning experiences, or cope with different disorders. For example,"bottle" probably means something very different to you now than it did when you were 2 years old! Language plays an important role in shaping the way we structure our knowledge about the world, and I often compare speakers of Mandarin Chinese and American English to understand how these languages influence their speakers and how bilinguals resolve differences between their languages.