alexis wellwood

I study the way that words combine into sentences, and the significance of those combinations to how human human beings represent and reason about the world.

I am a Professor in the School of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, with courtesy appointments in the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Psychology. Since Fall 2022, I have served as Deputy Director of Philosophy, and since Fall 2023, as a Leadership Fellow to the USC Dornsife Divisional Dean of Humanities. In 2019, I was one of three recipients of the Albert S. Raubenheimer award for Outstanding Junior Faculty in the USC Dornsife College of Arts, Letters, and Sciences.

When I arrived at USC in 2017, I created and direct the Meaning Lab, studying what adults and children know about word and sentence meaning. Since then, I have sat on the steering committee for the Cognitive Science Program. Prior to my arrival at USC, I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Northwestern University, affiliated with the Department of Philosophy and the Cognitive Science Program, where I created and directed the Child Language Development Laboratory.

I have led or been involved in collaborative research projects with linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and computer scientists. Some of these researchers were undergraduate students, graduate students, and post-doctoral scholars, usually under my direction. I have helped build research infrastructure and public outreach projects, including co-directing the Mind and Language in LA speaker series since 2018. Much of the research recently carried out in the Meaning Lab was funded by a National Science Foundation Brain and Cognitive Sciences grant that I was awarded in 2017. I directed the first fully-hybrid North American Summer School for Logic, Language, and Information at USC from June 18-24, 2022, and I have served as an Associate Editor for Journal of Semantics since 2021.

I earned my PhD in 2014 from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, advised by Valentine Hacquard. Paul Pietroski, Alexander Williams, Jeffrey Lidz, and Colin Phillips were unofficial mentors. At UMD, my research in semantics, language acquisition, and psycholinguistics was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, as well as the (then nascent) Maryland Language Science Center.