I am an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Language Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto, St. George. I also lead the UTM Language Acquisition & Processing (LAP) Lab.
I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, which made it difficult to adjust to being in Ravens country after my move to Baltimore for grad school (Go Steelers!). In 2016, I completed my PhD in Cognitive Science in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. My dissertation was entitled Active dependency completion in adults and children: Representations and adaptation. I was mainly advised by Dr. Akira Omaki. Additionally, I worked with Dr. Colin Wilson on modeling projects, and I was associated with the Language Acquisition Lab headed by Dr. Geraldine Legendre, with whom I also worked on issues of theoretical syntax. I spent the following 4 and a half years in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan, first as the Language Learning visiting assistant professor in the UM Department of Linguistics (2017-2019) and then as a post-doctoral fellow in the Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science (2019-2021) where I primarily worked with Dr. Julie Boland, and therefore had an additional association with the UM Department of Psychology.
Previously, I received my undergraduate degree from Georgetown University in Washington, DC, where I double majored in psychology and linguistics. Beginning at the end of my sophomore year, I was a member of the Early Learning Project, a developmental lab in the psychology department, under the supervision of Dr. Rachel Barr. I would eventually work with Dr. Barr on my honors thesis examining the effects of music and sound effects on 6-, 12-, and 18-month-olds’ ability to imitate a demonstrated action after a 24-hour delay.
I spent the spring semester of my junior year studying at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. It was there that I was introduced to psycholinguistics in a class taught by Dr. Debra Aarons. From this, I decided to pursue an interest in first language acquisition as a research area that combines both psychological and linguistic concepts and formalisms. My senior year, I began an accelerated master’s program in general linguistics, which I completed a year after graduating with my bachelor’s degree. In graduate school, I continued my love affair with syntax begun when I was an undergrad. For my master’s research paper, I conducted a corpus study on overgeneralization of the causative in children younger than 5-years-old (including a syntactic analysis of their errors) under the direction of Dr. Donna Lardiere.
I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, which made it difficult to adjust to being in Ravens country after my move to Baltimore for grad school (Go Steelers!). In 2016, I completed my PhD in Cognitive Science in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. My dissertation was entitled Active dependency completion in adults and children: Representations and adaptation. I was mainly advised by Dr. Akira Omaki. Additionally, I worked with Dr. Colin Wilson on modeling projects, and I was associated with the Language Acquisition Lab headed by Dr. Geraldine Legendre, with whom I also worked on issues of theoretical syntax. I spent the following 4 and a half years in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan, first as the Language Learning visiting assistant professor in the UM Department of Linguistics (2017-2019) and then as a post-doctoral fellow in the Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science (2019-2021) where I primarily worked with Dr. Julie Boland, and therefore had an additional association with the UM Department of Psychology.
Previously, I received my undergraduate degree from Georgetown University in Washington, DC, where I double majored in psychology and linguistics. Beginning at the end of my sophomore year, I was a member of the Early Learning Project, a developmental lab in the psychology department, under the supervision of Dr. Rachel Barr. I would eventually work with Dr. Barr on my honors thesis examining the effects of music and sound effects on 6-, 12-, and 18-month-olds’ ability to imitate a demonstrated action after a 24-hour delay.
I spent the spring semester of my junior year studying at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. It was there that I was introduced to psycholinguistics in a class taught by Dr. Debra Aarons. From this, I decided to pursue an interest in first language acquisition as a research area that combines both psychological and linguistic concepts and formalisms. My senior year, I began an accelerated master’s program in general linguistics, which I completed a year after graduating with my bachelor’s degree. In graduate school, I continued my love affair with syntax begun when I was an undergrad. For my master’s research paper, I conducted a corpus study on overgeneralization of the causative in children younger than 5-years-old (including a syntactic analysis of their errors) under the direction of Dr. Donna Lardiere.
