about my research
i work at the university of maryland's cnl lab with professor colin phillips. i am interested in sentence processing as well as the acquisition and representation of phonological systems from both experimental and computational view-points. previous projects have looked at the processing of both agreement and ergativity in hindi, and illicit dependency formation in negative polarity items and reflexives. 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 vowel categories from a computational standpoint, focusing on the vowel systems of turkish and arabic. this work looks at the role of guided statistics in building a vowel space, as well as the acquisition of vowel allophony, using familiar techniques from machine learning (i.e. clustering methods). in addition to this, i'm conducting experimental work to investigate the representation of vowel allophony in both amharic and english. other projects include examining island effects in wh-in-situ languages such as japanese and hindi from an experimental point of view (with shiti malhotra and dave kush), investigating the effects of various types of syntactic configurations on illusory dependency formation in negative polarity items (with alex drummond), and computational modeling of morphological change (with annie gagliardi).