Maya Taliaferro

Maya Taliaferro is a K. Lisa Yang post-baccalaureate research scholar working concurrently in the ECCL and the language labs at MIT with Dr. Evelina Fedorenko and Dr. Ted Gibson. In 2021 Maya received her BA in Neuroscience from Hamilton College with a minor in Japanese. Her passion for learning the Japanese language is what ultimately inspired her to study language in the mind and brain generally. Her primary interests lie in understanding how multilingual speakers reason about language pragmatically – that is, the ability to understand non-literal aspects of language – and how this ultimately informs differences in communication between one’s native and non-native languages.