Laurel tenured at UCLA

Associate Professor in computational linguistics and language acquisition.

Big congratulations to Laurel Perkins *19, who is now Associate Professor with tenure at UCLA in its Department of Linguistics. Laurel joined the department as Assistant Professor in 2020, one year after she completed her dissertation, How Grammars Grow: Argument Structure and the Acquisition of Non-Basic Syntax, supervised by Jeff, with a committee of Colin, Naomi and Alexander, plus Jan Edwards representing the Graduate School. During the one-year interim she was a post-doctoral fellow with Anne Christophe at the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique in the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. Then, arriving at UCLA, she joined 2010 alum Tim Hunter in handling the department's computational linguistics curriculum, in tandem with her research on early acquisition of syntax and semantics. And in the half dozen years since graduating, she has published over a dozen papers, including major journal articles in Language (2026), Developmental Science (2026), Cognition (2025), Language Learning and Development (2025), Cognitive Science (2022), the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021) and Language Acquisition (2020). This promotion could not be more deserved! Yay Laurel!