Layla Unger
Lecturer

Profile

Biography

Layla completed her BSc in Psychology at the University of Aberdeen in 2009, then moved on to complete an MSc in Psycholinguistics at the University of Edinburgh in 2010. From 2012 to 2017, Layla earned her PhD in Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. She then took up a position as a postdoctoral scholar at the Ohio State University, where she expanded her research into multiple facets of cognitive development, including language, concept and category learning. In 2024, she joined the faculty at the University of York.

Career

• BSc Psychology, University of Aberdeen, UK (2005 – 2009)
• MSc Psycholinguistics, University of Edinburgh, UK (2009 – 2010)
• PhD Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, US (2012 – 2017)

Research

Overview

In my research, I study how we develop rich, interconnected bodies of knowledge about the world that support our abilities to use language, reason, retrieve useful knowledge from memory, learn new things, and many other fundamental aspects of human intelligence.

Projects

My current projects tackle multiple questions including:

• Words are the building blocks of human communication. How do children expand their ability to communicate by picking up hundreds or even thousands of words just from the day-to-day language they hear and read?
• Successful communication relies not just on knowing individual words, but also how words are related to each other. For example, understanding even a simple sentence like “Bears love honey so much that they’re willing to get stung” relies on connections between words in the sentence and words that weren’t even mentioned, such as “bee”. How do children form these interconnected networks of word knowledge?
• Across childhood, we learn to perceive the complexity of the world in terms of simple categories, such as “cup”, “dog” and “chair”. These categories guide the way we think about and interact with their members. How do children learn categories from their everyday experiences?

Teaching

Publications

Selected publications

• Unger, L., Yim, H., Savic, O., Dennis, S, & Sloutsky, V. M. (2023). No frills: Simple regularities in language can go a long way in the development of word knowledge. Developmental Science, e13373.
• Unger, L. & Sloutsky, V. M. (2022). Ready to learn: Incidental exposure fosters category learning. Psychological Science, 33, 999–1019.
• Savic, O.*, Unger, L.* & Sloutsky, V. M. (2022). Experience and maturation: The contribution of co-occurrence regularities in language to the development of semantic organization. Child Development, 94, 142–158.
• Unger, L., Savic, O., & Sloutsky, V. M. (2020). Statistical regularities shape semantic organization throughout development. Cognition, 198, 104190.

Full publications list

See Google Scholar for a full list of publications.

External activities