Broadly speaking, I am interested in exploring how cognitive and social processes shape the ways in which we learn, perceive, and produce language. My primary research examines the relationship between communicative skills and linguistic processing in children and adults. I use a combination of experimental- and observation-based methods to investigate these processes.
Much of my work focuses in particular on how communicative and linguistic skills co-develop during in the first few years of life with the hope of better understanding how our capacity to produce, understand, and transmit language across generations is shaped by interactive needs.
My current project, funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) compares how children's early interactive experience influences their communicative development in two rural indigenous communities, one in Papua New Guinea and the other in Southern Mexico.
I received my PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University in 2013. I have been a post-doctoral researcher at the MPI for Psycholinguistics since then, and will join the Comparative Human Development department at the University of Chicago as an assistant professor in January 2021.
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