About Me

Hi! My name is Lily Zihui Zhu. I am a second-year PhD student at Harvard Psychology working with Jesse Snedeker and Elika Bergelson in the Harvard Laboratory for Developmental Studies. I am interested in early compositional thinking and its relationship to language acquisition. My research explores the conceptual building blocks of thought, the structured relations that allow these elements to combine, and how such structured representations are mapped onto compositional language.

Before Harvard, I studied Cognitive Science (BA) and Data Science (BS, MS) at Johns Hopkins University. My undergraduate research examined the interactions between syntax, discourse, pragmatics, and prosody in child-directed speech (JHU Language Acquisition Lab, PI: Géraldine Legendre). I also interned at the Gopnik Lab at UC Berkeley, where I worked with Rebecca Zhu on how children comprehend, produce, and learn from various types of symbols (e.g., non-literal language, pictures, and relational words). For my master’s thesis, I collaborated with Lei Yuan at CU Boulder to investigate how base-10 transparency in cross-linguistic number names influences deep learning models’ ability to name number symbols.