Mikaela Belle Martin

From Boston to Philly

I was born and raised in Boston, MA and the Mattapan neighborhood, specifically. Growing up in the city, you become exposed to a number of different languages, dialects, and cultures; this cultural and linguistic diversity planted the early question of how we can speak the same languages and understand each other while still maintaining sociocultural boundaries and structures. I started at Harvard in 2019 and initially majored in psychology with a linguistics minor, before switching the order and majoring in linguistics with a cognitive science focus and psychology minor. After graduating in 2023, I began my Ph.D. at UPenn in linguistics, focusing on socio-semantic processing.