Sophie Faircloth

Coming from small town Louisiana, I came into Penn with zero research experience. With a little luck–and a lot of support from CURF and Penn's resources–I was able to start working with a mentor in the Wellbeing and Morality Lab in the Psychology department who allowed me to grow into a self-sufficient research assistant. I joined the Cultural Evolution of Language Lab through PURM in the summer of 2021 and designed my own experiment in experimental semiotics on the sudden complexification of signals in a novel communication system. I am currently a submatriculant in Linguistics, working primarily in pragmatics and sociolinguistics. I am now working on a project in Dr. Anna Papafragou’s Language and Cognition Lab on regional dialect variation and underinformativeness. I am also currently working on my MA thesis: Sarcasm Socially Contextualized: How Socio-Indexical Information Modulates the Evaluation of Pragmatic Behavior, under the supervision of Dr. Meredith Tamminga, and am presenting this work at XPrag X in Paris and NWAV 51 in New York in Fall 2023.

This is your gentle reminder that getting into research at a big research institution is scary, and it is more than okay to seek out help from others who have overcome the same fears (or feel free to shoot me an email if you want to talk more about any projects I’m currently on, managing research/life balance, getting the confidence to present your ideas, or the submatriculation process at Penn)! 

• Research Assistant, Language Variation and Cognition Lab: Dr. Meredith Tamminga, Linguistics (2022-Present)
• Research Assistant, Cultural Evolution of Language Lab: Dr. Gareth Roberts, Linguistics, PURM (2020-Present)
  • Penn PURM Poster Expo (Fall 2021)
• Research Assistant, Solomon Labs: Dr. Geoff Goodwin, Social Psychology (2020-2022)
• Senior Research Assistant, Wellbeing and Morality Lab: Dr. Jessie Sun, Moral Psychology (2019-2022)
• SBSI Research Assistant Training Program (2019)