about my research
i work at the university of maryland's cnl lab with professor colin phillips and professor william idsardi. i am interested in sentence processing as well as the acquisition and representation of phonological systems. in my research, i interpolate insights from theoretical, experimental, and computational view-points. in addition, i am seriously committed to taking a cross-linguistic approach to outstanding problems in psycholinguistics; by examining languages from a wider typological base, theories are always made richer. prior to coming to maryland, i worked with professor robert van valin on the morphosyntax of modern irish.i'm currently exploring the acquisition of phonological systems from a computational standpoint, focusing on the vowel systems of turkish, west greenlandic, and inuktitut. this work looks at the role of guided statistics in building a category space and an operational phonological grammar. additionally, i am interested in the mechanisms which would allow learners to uncover underlying phonological representations in neutralized environments (joint work with ewan dunbar).
additionally, i am interested in illuminating the relation between memory access procedures and structure-building operations during sentence processing. this line of research is informed both by studying licit and illicit dependency formations in online comprehension. for the moment, i am exploring this by examining the processing of the mandarin long-distance reflexive ziji. this is research i conducted in the lab of professor taomei guo at the national key laboratory of neuroscience. this work was supported by an NSF EAPSI grant, and extends previous work on illicit dependency formation in negative polarity items, English anaphors, and subject-verb agreement.