I am an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the CUNY Graduate Center where I direct the Psycholinguistics *Lab, help lead the Cognitive Science affiliation, and am a core contributor to (and, through Fall 2025, interim director of) the master's program in computational linguistics. I am a computational linguist and psycholinguist doing research on questions intersecting linguistics, computation, and cognition, with a particular focus on language acquisition and language processing.
I build computational and algorithmic models of language learning and mental representation. I also use experimental methods (categorization, coordination, parsing, eye-tracking, perceptual learning, on-line reasoning, etc.) and apply quantitative, corpus, and statistical techniques to answer questions in theoretical linguistics.
Some secondary academic interests include (in alphabetical order): Chinese languages, cognitive psychology (attention, learning, memory, representation, you name it), evolution, experimental philosophy, formal language theory, language variation and change, NLP (both old-school and statistical), parsing, perception, phonology, social learning, and software engineering.
Contact me for complete CV, or feel free to reach out if there's more you want to know, data you can't find, code you can't get to run, or for general research inquiries (a note though about that last time: I generally do not work on second-language learning, applied linguistics, or probing what LLMs do/don't know).
Hot off the presses📢🆕🔥
Way back in the day I completed Undergraduate degrees in Linguistics and Computer Science at Brown University where I worked with Eugene Charniak in the Brown Laboratory for Linguistic Information Processing.
365 5th Ave
New York, NY 10016
Word learning as category formation (in PLOS One)
(pre-print) "A Simple Threshold Captures the Social Learning of Conventions" [code]
(Upcoming at CogSci) "Polysemy and Inference: Reasoning with Underspecified Representations" [2025]
A few papers to highlight
Now You Hear Me, Later You Don't: The Immediacy of Linguistic Computation and the Representation of Speech (in Psychological Science)
Miller's monkey updated: Communicative efficiency and the statistics of words in natural language (in Cognition)
Another model not for the learning of language (in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science)
What usage can tell us about grammar: Embedded verb second in Scandinavian (in Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics)
Previously
Before joining the GC, I spent several years as faculty of Computer Science at Swarthmore College, plus a stint in the Developmental Intelligence Lab and Center for Perceptual Systems at The University of Texas at Austin.I received my Ph.D from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania where I was jointly advised by the wonderful team of Charles Yang, John Trueswell, and Mitch Marcus. I was a member of the Language Learning Lab in the Department of Psychology in addition to the NLP group in the Department of Computer and Information Science.
My dissertation, The Immediacy of Linguistic Computation, investigates the way that language unfolds over time, and explores the ramifications of the temporal restrictions inherent to information processing, with a particular emphasis on the intermediate representations constructed during online processing and their relationship to Input/Output mappings.
