☄ NEW

The real-time comprehenison of wh-dependencies in a Wh-Agreement language

with Sandra Chung & Manuel F. Borja, May 2013.

Processing covert dependencies: an SAT study on Mandarin Wh-in-situ questions

with Ming Xiang (lead), Brian Dillon, Fengqin Liu & Taomei Guo, March 2013.
Accepted, Journal of East Asian Linguistics.

Obama, resumptive pronouns and verbatim memory, a Twitter mini-experiment

Reflexive anaphora, similarity-based retrieval interference and the focus of attention

Do reflexives always find a good antecedent for themselves?

with Joseph King & Caroline Andrews [poster presented at CUNY25, March 2012]

Islands don't reflect WM constraints

A test of the relation between working memory capacity and syntactic island effects

with Jon Sprouse & Colin Phillips, Language (March 2012 issue)

And Working memory capacity and island effects: a reminder of the issues and the facts
(A reply to commentary generated by our first article; first comment, second comment)

My research and instruction asks questions about the mental data structures of syntactic representation and the interface between language structure and memory. For example:

• how are linguistic representations segmented in memory?
• what are the mechanisms for the prediction and retrieval of syntactic information?
• how do linguistic feature systems control access to constituent encodings?
• how do grammatical principles and extra-linguistic constraints interact?

An important current research project is incremental comprehension in Chamorro. Chamorro is a verb-initial Austronesian language with an intricately interacting system of movement, case, and agreement. My collaborators and I are investigating how syntax-morphology interactions impact the comprehender's expectations and how different sources of expectation guide early interpretation. This forms part of an effort to increase the contribution to psycholinguistic theory made by 'small' languages. We conduct our research in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. With: Sandra Chung (UCSC) and Manuel F. Borja (Inetnon Åmot yan Kutturan Natibu, CNMI; [photo]). Our research is supported by the NSF (Award #1251429).

training
2009: Post-doc, New York University, advisor: Brian McElree
2008: Ph.D., Linguistics, Maryland, advisor: Colin Phillips
2003: A.B. (Honors), Molecular biology (Neuroscience), Princeton, advisor: Sam Wang
1999: Diploma, North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

collaborators
Pranav Anand, Sandy Chung, Brian Dillon, Donka Farkas, Ellen Lau
Brian McElree, Colin Phillips, Jon Sprouse, Ming Xiang, Masha Polinsky
Nate Arnett, Adam Morgan, Joseph King, Caroline Andrews