Assistant Professor, Cognitive & Information Sciences, School of Social Sciences and Humanities
How do humans understand each other? I study how individuals make sophisticated inferences, in real time, during communication in order to extract meaning from language input that can be noisy and ambiguous, as well as how this ability changes over the lifespan or breaks down in individuals with language disorders (e.g., aphasia).
I combine insights from eye-tracking, electrophysiology, computational approaches, fieldwork, and neuropsychology to understand 1) how people use various sources of information (visuo-spatial perspective, the speaker’s knowledge state, language statistics, etc.) to generate and constrain their linguistic predictions, and 2) how lifelong learning allows inferences to be adaptive when the environment changes.
