My primary research interests are on language processing and learning. I study language both through computational models and also through psycholinguistic and neuroimaging studies.

In my early work I was interested in speech perception, and what the mechanisms are that make it possible for humans to perceive complex acoustic inputs with such apparent ease. With Jay McClelland, I developed the TRACE model. TRACE is a neural network that takes either simulated or real speech as input, and exhibits a number of phenomena characteristic of humans perception.

In more recent work, I have studied both sentence-level and discourse-level language phenomena. In research with Mary Hare, Ken McRae, Klinton Bicknell, and others, I have tried to understand expectancy generation in sentence processing. This work has pushed us towards an appreciation for the role of 'higher-level' knowlegde, including event representations. With Andy Kehler, Hannah Rohde, and Laura Kertz, I have tried to understand aspects of pronoun interpretation as a function of discourse coherence.

Current projects include the above, as well as developmental studies that focus on language learning in the first year of life. This collaborative work--with Katie Travis, Matt Leonard, Eric Halgre, and Tim Brown--uses anatomically constrained MEG to study both 12-15 month infants and older children. Finally, I am engaged in a collaborative project with Arielle Borovsky and Marta Kutas, in which we are looking at word learning in young adults. We are particularly interested in incidental or implicit learning of words in context, given single examples. This work uses both behavioral and event related potential methodologies.

The Publications link goes to a page listing downloadable PDFs of recent papers. For other papers, please email me using the Contact link.

Abstract of NIH grant on Expectancy Generation in Sentence Processing