I'm a grad student in the linguistics department at UC Santa Barbara. My main interest is in the relationship between language and cognition. I'm interested in linguistic cognition, but I'm also interested in language in general, and in cognition in general. I think that in order to understand linguistic cognition it is essential to also examine non-cognitive aspects of language and non-linguistic aspects of cognition. Because of that, I'm particularly keen on making use of ideas (both theoretical and methodological) from other fields, especially psychology, philosophy, and computer science. Methodologically, most of what I do is either quantitative corpus linguistics or experimental psycholinguistics.

Under this broad umbrella of language and cognition I've engaged in various projects. A couple examples: My master's thesis developed a statistical, corpus-linguistic approach to defining productivity in child language, and showed how this can clarify questions about whether early grammar is lexically specific or general in character. Another project investigated where untrained listeners perceive prosodic boundaries in natural speech. (A paper based on this research is slated to appear in 2012 in Units of Talk, a book edited by Beatrice Szczepek Reed and Geoff Raymond, and published by John Benjamins.)

I'm currently in the early stages of my dissertation research, in which I'll be looking at how and whether a person's specific experiences with linguistic forms (e.g., words, syntactic constructions) can affect how that person's later comprehension or production of those forms. In particular, I'm focusing on the role of nonlinguistic dimensions of experience --- that is, if some linguistic form is encountered in some situation, can nonlinguistic features of that situation influence later use of that form, and if so, how?

I'm pursuing the interdisciplinary graduate emphasis in cognitive science at UCSB. Along with several other grad students, I'm also involved in creating a language-and-cognition research group called SCUL: Studying the Cognitive Underpinnings of Language.

My CV is available here in PDF form.