Research/Areas of Interest:
Psychology of Language, Linguistics
Education
- PhD, Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, United States, 2010
- MA, Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University, United States, 2005
- BA, Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania, United States, 2003
- BA, Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania, United States, 2003
Biography
My research program focuses on understanding the cognitive processes that underlie spoken and written language production. Of primary interest to me are the processes involved in producing morphologically complex words, specifically the interplay of lexical and grammatical processes and the ways in which morphological structure affects phonological form. To address these issues I utilize several methodologies from cognitive science including phonology and phonetics, psycholinguistics, cognitive neuropsychology and computational simulation. This approach allows me to pursue these questions in a problem-centered, interdisciplinary manner.
Some of the questions I ask are:
Spoken Production
- How are multimorphemic words such as compounds stored in long term memory, what factors influence the way they are represented, and what
implications do these different representations have for phonological production?
- How do performance factors such as the speed of lexical retrieval and cascading activation influence the outcome of grammatical phonological processes?
- How is information from various processing streams (whole word vs. compositional routes in morphology; lexical and sub-lexical routes in reading) integrated?
Written Production
- How is serial order -the process by which each letter in a word is produced in the proper order- achieved in spelling?
- What is the structure of orthographic representations?
- What statistical knowledge do we have of the way letters may combine in a language?
- How does morphological structure influence spelling?
Some of the questions I ask are:
Spoken Production
- How are multimorphemic words such as compounds stored in long term memory, what factors influence the way they are represented, and what
implications do these different representations have for phonological production?
- How do performance factors such as the speed of lexical retrieval and cascading activation influence the outcome of grammatical phonological processes?
- How is information from various processing streams (whole word vs. compositional routes in morphology; lexical and sub-lexical routes in reading) integrated?
Written Production
- How is serial order -the process by which each letter in a word is produced in the proper order- achieved in spelling?
- What is the structure of orthographic representations?
- What statistical knowledge do we have of the way letters may combine in a language?
- How does morphological structure influence spelling?