I am an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at George Mason University. My research explores the mental tools that allow children to learn language, understand it in real-time and adapt to the ways it varies in everyday life. I’m especially interested in how people find and use the connections between words in a sentence given the many kinds of variation in natural language.
This Fall, I’m leading a graduate seminar on the psycholinguistics of agreement, and teaching First Language Acquisition. Other classes I’ve taught include Syntax, Modern English Grammar, and seminars on the syntax and processing of negation, language acquisition and linguistic variation, and the development of language processing.
About
Before coming to Mason, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Language Science at Penn State, exploring how language variation affects children’s acquisition of plural morphology and agreement. I earned my PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2014, with work on how 2- and 3-year-old children use subject-verb agreement during language comprehension and production. I received my BA in Linguistics from the University of Maryland, where I investigated 2-year-olds’ pronoun interpretation.
Lately, I’ve been working on projects exploring variation in English agreement and negation. In one project, I’m working with Frances Blanchette, Jessi Grieser, and Paul Reed to ask when speakers use different structures to express negation, and how they comprehend those structures (even the ones they never use!). In another, I’m exploring children’s acquisition of variable subject-verb agreement in English, and how that’s reflected in their real-time comprehension and their own speech.
Take a look around for more information about me and my research.