Rate My Professor Charles Yang

Charles Yang is Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science and serves as Chair of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Program in Cognitive Science, a position he has held since 2011, and co-directs the Integrated Language Science and Technology group with John Trueswell. Yang earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000 after studying at the MIT AI Lab. Prior to his appointment at Penn, he was on the faculty at Yale University. His research investigates learning by humans and machines across linguistics, computer science, and psychology.

Yang's academic interests encompass language acquisition, processing, and change; morphology and the mental lexicon; computational linguistics; numerical cognition; and the evolution of language and cognition. He is the author of The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World (2006) and The Price of Linguistic Productivity: How Children Learn to Break the Rules (MIT Press, 2016), which received the 2017 Leonard Bloomfield Book Award from the Linguistic Society of America. Key publications include 'Another model not for the learning of language' (PNAS, 2022, with Jordan Kodner and Spencer Caplan), 'Miller's Monkey Updated: Communicative Efficiency and the Statistics of Words in Natural Language' (Cognition, 2020, with Spencer Caplan and Jordan Kodner), 'Using the Tolerance Principle to predict language change' (Language Variation and Change, 2019, with Betsy Sneller and Josef Fruehwald), 'The growth of language: Universal grammar, experience, and principles of efficient computation' (Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2017, with Stephen Crain et al.), 'Ontogeny and Phylogeny of Language' (PNAS, 2013), and 'Negative knowledge from positive evidence' (Language, 2015). Yang has received the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a 2018 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.