I am a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Southern California.
My primary research focus is in psycholinguistics, in particular human sentence processing. My Google Scholar profile is here. I completed my dissertation work at the Linguistics Department at the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. My dissertation focused on reference resolution in Finnish, Dutch and Estonian, using a combination of psycholinguistic and corpus data. Prior to that, I received a B.A. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Princeton University in 1997, and an M.A. in Psychology from Penn in 2001. I was a post-doc at the Center for Language Sciences at the University of Rochester from 2003 to 2005. I moved to Los Angeles in 2005.
My research interests include
Issues at the syntax/semantics/pragmatics interface(s), such as
- ways of encoding and processing information structure, including word order and prosody
- coherence relations in discourse, especially causality
- perspective-taking, predicates of personal taste, subjectivity, free indirect discourse and related phenomena
Issues related to reference resolution and dependency formation, such as
- comprehension and production of personal pronouns, demonstratives, reflexives and reciprocals
- generic and impersonal reference
- representation and processing of linguistic and non-linguistic dependencies (e.g. wh-dependencies and satiation effects, relations between the representation of dependencies in language and music)
Crosslinguistic work in typologically diverse languages (including Finnish, Estonian, French, German and Dutch, and collaborative work on Bangla/Bengali, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese)
