Kyla McConnell

I’m a postdoctoral researcher in the Psychology of Language department, where I focus on individual differences in language production and comprehension. My work centers around the development of a battery of linguistic and cognitive tasks for English speakers, which will also be made available as a tool to other researchers. I’m particularly interested in investigating the different pathways individuals may take to understand language and how these covary with other cognitive abilities or processing styles. Additional research interests of mine include probabilistic language processing and usage-based linguistics, and I take a special interest in statistical methods.

Before coming to the MPI, I conducted research in Freiburg, Germany for my Ph.D. on individual differences and task effects in probabilistic language processing. In this, I was supervised by Alice Blumenthal-Dramé and supported by the German academic scholarship foundation (“Studienstiftung”). My undergraduate studies were at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

At the MPI, I'm a member of the Research Staff Committee and the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Committee.