About Me
I am an assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at UCI. I have PhD in Linguistics from the University of Maryland, where I worked with Howard Lasnik, Norbert Hornstein, and Colin Phillips.
About My Research
My research builds on the hypothesis that there is a set of elementary cognitive operations underlying syntactic structure building, some of which will be generally available across cognitive domains – such as concatenation and hierarchy, which are potentially primitive operations in other domains of experience such as vision, math, and music – and some of which will be particular to language. From this perspective, syntactic structures offer an ideal opportunity to investigate the elements of linguistic representation specifically, and mental representation more generally, as they lie at an intersection of language-specific and domain-general operations, and mediate between other cognitive domains such as audition/vision (phonology) and meaning (semantics). As with any linguistic representation, syntactic structures can be studied in two ways: as a static, complete representation, and as a set of intermediate representations that unfold dynamically in real time during incremental comprehension (and production). Traditionally, these two aspects of syntactic structures have been studied relatively independently of each other: the final representation is generally the domain of syntactic theory (i.e., the grammar), and the dynamic, unfolding representation is generally the domain of psycholinguistics (i.e., the parser).
My research aims to bridge these two fields by bringing psycholinguistically sophisticated methodologies (acceptability judgment experiments and Event-Related Potentials) to bear on linguistically sophisticated questions (e.g., to what extent do two constructions that differ in surface syntax share a common genesis, perhaps due to a particular grammatical operation), in an effort to tease apart properties of the final representation and properties of the intermediate representations. In this way, the goal of my research is to test, refine, and expand the claims of existing grammatical theories, while simultaneously laying a linguistically sophisticated empirical foundation that may lead to the eventual synthesis of syntactic theory with sentence processing.
I'll leave you with a little wisdom from Oscar Wilde:
