I received a B.A. in cognitive psychology from Yale University in 1996. I received a Ph.D. in cognitive science from MIT in 2001, and did a postdoctoral fellowship at UMass Amherst from 2001-2003. I study how people understand language. How do people who read or hear a string of words form an appropriate mental representation based on those words and the context? I’m particularly interested in the interface between language (e.g., syntactic structure, noun phrase form, etc.) and other aspects of cognition (e.g., memory, object individuation, inference generation, etc.). My work is informed by formal linguistics as well as cognitive psychology.

Projects that I am currently working on include: (1) investigating the working memory costs of building syntactic structure and how they interact with costs of referential access; (2) the processing costs of quantifiers; and (3) the effects of different kinds/degrees of plausibility violations on eye-movements during reading in order to study the process of incorporating information into a discourse model. Projects that I anticipate working on in the future involve: (1) investigating the time course of the computation of scalar implicatures in adults and children; (2) testing alternative models of theta-role assignment in order to address questions at the interface between syntax and world knowledge; and (3) investigating the computation of and the development of the use of pragmatic cues to object individuation in very early language learners.