Beginning July 2017, I am the Language Learning visiting assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
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!). I recently (September 2016) 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 with whom I continue to collaborate on research on child sentence processing and the development of the child parser in the Language Development & Processing Lab. Additionally, I work 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 work on issues of theoretical syntax.
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!). I recently (September 2016) 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 with whom I continue to collaborate on research on child sentence processing and the development of the child parser in the Language Development & Processing Lab. Additionally, I work 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 work on issues of theoretical syntax.
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.
