Allison Nguyen
Assistant Professor
Psychology
Office
DEG Degarmo Hall 435
Office Hours
Please email for office hours.
Office Phone
Email
Website
- About
- Education
- Awards & Honors
- Research
Biography
I am a psycholinguist deeply interested in understanding how people can shape the conversations they participate in. My work sits at the intersection of linguistic representation and spontaneous communication, with much of my work exploring how conversational effects arise from the interaction of semantic, pragmatic, and contextual factors. I employ a variety of methods in my work, including experimental methods, corpus analyses, and qualitative methods, as well as collaborating with psychologists across subfields, linguists across subfields and scholars in neighboring fields, such as computer science. I hold a B.S. in Cognitive Science from UCLA, a MS in Psychology (Cognitive) from UCSC, a PhD in Psychology (Cognitive), and an MA in Linguistics from UCSC.
Current Courses
PSY 390.016 Advanced Research Apprenticeship
PSY 455.001 Cognitive Science
PSY 499.016 Independent Research For The Master's Thesis
PSY 400.016 Independent Study
PSY 331.002 Laboratory In Research Methods For Psych: Cognitive Processes
PSY 290.016 Special Projects: Research Apprenticeship
MA Linguistics
University of California, Santa Cruz
PhD Cognitive Psychology
University of California, Santa Cruz
MS Cognitive Psychology
University of California, Santa Cruz
BS Cognitive Science
University of California, Los Angeles
Impact Award
Illinois State University
2025
Outstanding TA Award
UCSC Psychology Department
2023
Humanizing Technology Teaching Fellowship
UCSC The Humanities Institute
2022
Quarter Dissertation Fellowship
UCSC Division of Social Sciences
2022
Summer Dissertation Fellowship
UCSC Psychology Department
2022
Frank X. Barron Award in Creativity Research
UCSC Psychology Department
2019
Summer Research Award
UCSC Psychology Department
2019
Fellowship
UC Regents
2018
The Federico and Rena Perlino Award
UCSC Psychology Department
2018
Travel Grant
UCSC Psychology Department
2017
Grants & Contracts
BirdFEEDER. Illinois State University. Illinois State University. (2024)
Journal Article
Nguyen, A., & Fox Tree, J. How authority affects social evaluations of negotiation words. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 10.1 (2025)
Nguyen, A. Language as an Act of Human Connection. The American Journal of Psychology 138.3 (2025): 342-344.
Nguyen, A., & Fox Tree, J. Pragmatic uses of I don’t know, boosters, and hedges in text and talk. Dialogue & Discourse 16.1 (2025): 68-90.
Fox Tree, J., Herring, S., Nguyen, A., Whittaker, S., Martin, R., & Takayama, L. Conversational Fluency and Attitudes Towards Robot Pilots in Telepresence Robot-Mediated Interactions. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 33.3 (2024): 473-498.
Guydish, A., Nguyen, A., & Fox Tree, J. Discourse markers in small talk and tasks. Discourse Studies 26.5 (2024): 606-620.
Nguyen, A., Guydish, A., & Fox Tree, J. Backchannels in the lab and in the wild. Interaction Studies. Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems 25.1 (2024): 70-99.
Nguyen, A., Roberts, T., Anand, P., & Fox Tree, J. Look, Dude: How hyperpartisan and non-hyperpartisan speech differ in online commentary. Discourse & Society 33.3 (2022): 371-390.
Fox Tree, J., Whittaker, S., Herring, S., Chowdhury, Y., Nguyen, A., & Takayama, L. Psychological distance in mobile telepresence. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 151 (2021): 102629.
Presentations
Authority and Expressions of Knowledge. Annual Meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association. (2025)
Authority and Expressions of Knowledge. Illinois State University Research Symposium. (2025)
Do college students understand political orientation?. Annual Meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association. (2025)
Knowing versus Believing: the effects evidentials and authority have on certainty. Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. (2025)
New Discourse Markers in Mediated Communication. Illinois State University Research Symposium. (2025)
Optimizing AAC board layouts: the impact of organization on communication efficiency. Illinois State University Research Symposium. (2025)
Political Orientation and Ostracism. Illinois State University Research Symposium. (2025)
Reading comprehension as a result of syntactic structures. Illinois State University Research Symposium. (2025)
Understanding Negotiation in Communication. Cognitive Psychology Colloquium. University of California Santa Cruz. (2025)
What do you meme? Memes & Internet Virality. Science on Tap. (2025)
omg lol: New Discourse Markers in Text and Talk. Colloquium. Mississippi State University. (2025)
Comments on Andrea Beltrama’s Talk. Studies in Language, Information, Meaning, and Expression 3. (2024)
Emojis as backchannels. Illinois State University Research Symposium. (2024)
LOL as a discourse marker. Annual Meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association. (2024)
Online Discourse Markers, LOL. Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. Psychonomic Society. (2024)
Negotiation and agreement in conversations.. Workshop on Argumentation and Maneuvering Agreement in Discourse. (2023)
Writing Style Affects Partisanship and Persuasiveness Ratings. Multidisciplinary International Symposium on Disinformation in Open Online Media.. (2023)
Absolutely Persuasive, Kinda Negotiating. Rising Star Colloquium Series.. (2022)
Hedges Hedge, Boosters Boost. Annual Meeting of the Psycho- nomic Society.. (2022)
Understanding Words of Negotiation in Context. The 35th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing.. (2022)
Hedging words in conversation.. California Meeting on Psycholin- guistics.. (2021)
Interpreting Negotiation Words In and Out of Context.. Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. (2021)
These words kinda matter.. Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. (2020)
Fake News and Desirable Difficulties.. University of California Santa Cruz. (2019)
Little Words in a Big Corpus. Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. (2019)