I am a first language acquisition researcher interested in the interface between language and other domains of cognition. My primary interest concerns the relationship between semantics (literal meaning) and pragmatics (interpreted/intended meaning), and the acquisition of functional categories like negation, tense, and auxiliaries. I have a secondary interest in statistical methods, inductive inference, and the role of input in language acquisition, particularly with respect to differences in how developing children and transformer-based language models make use of input.

At the Quad Lab I will be investigating the relationship between quantitative reasoning development and children’s acquisition of natural language quantifiers like “some”, “all”, “most”, and “many.”