About me

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI). I joined the MPI Language Development Department in October 2023. I work with Caroline Rowland on the Language 0-5 project, investigating the development of hierarchical structure and complex planning. I am particularly interested in how prediction, planning, and overgeneralization errors during development help children build representations that organize sequences of words.

I received my PhD from the University of Oregon Department of Linguistics in 2019 under the supervision of Volya Kapatsinski. My dissertation is about “Accessibility-driven Language Production” and its effect on language use through semantic extension [pdf]. After completing my PhD, I joined the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) and worked in Naomi Feldman’s lab, modeling morphological learning in typically developing children and children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). At UMD, I was also a member of the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) lab and a postdoc affiliate at the Department of Linguistics and the program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS). Following my postdoc at UMD, I briefly joined the Univeristy of Iowa DLD Longitudinal Study team at the Department of Communiucation Sciences and Disorders to study processing difficulties in adults with DLD using eye-tracking.

My research explores how speakers extend familiar forms to novel contexts, and factors that influence the ease or difficulty of this process. More specifically, I study how form-based cues and top-down cues influence generalization and productivity, how reliance on these cues help with hierarchical and sequential planning, and how these cues interact during learning and development. See my publications page for more information.

Areas of Interest

Automaticity, sequential learning, and chunking in language

Accessibility-driven language production and its effect on generalization and semantic extension (creativity)

Cue integration and cue competition in language and speech

Interaction between automaticity and creativity in language

Computational modeling including probabilistic and connectionist models

Usage-based and experience-based influences on language development and learning