Campus Directory

Pronouns she, her, her, hers, herself

Division Social Sciences Division

Department/College/Unit Psychology Department

Title Assistant Professor

Affiliation Faculty

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Web Site

Primary Office Location Social Sciences 2
375

Additional Location(s) Lab: Social Sciences 2, Room 229

Office Hours for Students/ Office Hours (Spring 2025) Wed., 11am -12pm Soc Sci 2 rm 375

Mail Stop Psychology Faculty Services

Biography, Education and Training

Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis

M.S.W., Columbia University

B.A., University of Chicago

Research Interests

How racial and linguistic diversity in neighborhood, community, and cultural contexts shape social group conception in racial majority and minority children; how a person’s accent is an important social marker in addition to race; and how children learn about societal inequalities and how to foster political activism.

Selected Publications

• Hwang, H.G., Debnath, R., Meyer, M., Salo, V. C., Fox, N.A. & Woodward, A. (2021). Neighborhood racial demographics predict infants’ neural responses to people of different races. Developmental Science, 24(4), e13070.
• Hwang, H. G. & Markson, L (2018). Locals don’t have accents: Children weigh phonological proficiency over syntactic or semantic proficiency when categorizing individuals. Journal of Child Language, 45(4), 1018 – 1034.
• DeJesus, J., Hwang, H. G., Dautel, J. B., & Kinzler, K. D. (2017). ‘American = English-speaker’ before ‘American = White.’ The development of children’s reasoning about nationality. Child Development, 89(5), 1752 – 1767.