I specialize in language comprehension at the level of word and sentence. Part of my research uses semantic priming methods to study the representation of word meaning. My complementary area of research uses syntactic priming methods to examine the representation of how words combine to form sentence structures. The cognitive model that unites these two domains uses co- occurrence relationships between words and word classes to describe the foundation of syntactic knowledge. My research draws upon connectionist models in Cognitive Science and the emergent properties of language representation that are popular in Cognitive Linguistics.

I use a variety of behavioral and psychophysiological methods to test theories of language comprehension. Measures of reading time, reaction time, or judgments of grammatical acceptability provide evidence regarding ease of processing, that is, how easy it is to recognize and understand language in a variety of contexts. The results of my experiments inform theories of linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science.

Curriculum Vitae