About me

I am an early career researcher studying basic mechanisms of sentence processing across diverse languages and diverse language experiences. To date, I have conducted research on sentence processing in Basque, French, English, and Mandarin and tested participants who are monolinguals, second language learners, and first language attriters. I myself am a reformed monolingual English speaker trying to make up for lost time by living my personal and professional life in different languages.

I am curious about the potential for real-time parsing to be impacted by language experience – although humans generally share the basics of neural architecture, and language itself is constrained to this architecture, we know that there is variability among languages for how sounds, sequences, and sense are expressed. Is this variability such that core processing mechanisms differ among languages?

To address this and related questions, I use EEG and behavioral experiments to test processing of a variety of sentence types. I am interested in what the mind is doing at the millisecond level in incremental sentence processing. As one of the most complex feats of human cognition, language can teach us about how the brain uses rules, manages multiple levels of information, and learns and forgets.

Alongside my research, I am passionate about science as a tool for fostering collaboration and people-to-people connections across borders and across geopolitical tensions. My research training has taken me from the US to Spain, Canada, and China, and I am eager to take part in open and global science initiatives. You can click here to hear about some of my experience studying Mandarin.