About Me

I am a post-doctoral fellow with the Trueswell-Gleitman lab in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. In May 2018, I received my PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California.

Methodologically, I believe that a one-size-fit-all approach to data collection and analysis is insufficient. As a result, my work draws from a variety of languages (English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Korean), utilizes a range experimental methods (e.g. visual world eye-tracking in production, reading-time and reaction-time measures, and web-based questionnaires), and is informed by a number of statistical approaches (e.g. linear mixed effects regression, robust methods, etc.).

Click for a downloadable version of my CV or read about some of my work below!


(1) Real-Time Sentence Production: Getting from Thoughts to Language

My work language production deals with how speakers go from thoughts to linguistic messages. I investigate how speakers decide what to include in their messages, how the conceptual representations of those messages are structured, and how speakers translate those messages into a linguistic form. My work in this domain uses cross-linguistic comparisons to investigate factors like word order, syntactic structure, discourse-pragmatic, etc.

(2) Real-Time Processing of Ungrammatical Sentences: Building ‘Unbuildable’ Structures

I am interested in a phenomenon called syntactic satiation (aka ‘that thing that happens when you read a bad sentence too many times and then it starts to sound good’). I investigate what happens if the cognitive system encounters input for which a syntactic structure may not be ‘buildable’ given the rules of the language. In these cases, does the cognitive system even attempt to build a syntactic representation or does it abandon the search for structure altogether?

Research Keywords: Sentence Processing, Psycholinguistics, Scope of Planning, Sentence Production, Second Language, Experimental Syntax, Islands, Satiation, Message Formulation, Discourse-Pragmatics

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