Subject-Verb Agreement
These studies examine the way humans produce language and keep track of grammatical information across an entire sentence. Specifically, my master's and doctoral work examined the syntactic and semantic properties of noun phrases that elicit subject-verb agreement errors in sentences as a means to understand the underlying mechanisms of syntactic planning. This work was conducted in collaboration with Neal Pearlmutter at Northeastern University.

I am also beginning a line of studies that examines the influence of conceptual/notional number on agreement computation during sentence production. This work will be conducted in collaboration with Laurel Brehm at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Prosody
I am conducting a number of studies that examine prosody as a way to elucidate the scope of planning during language production. The goal of this exploratory work is to determine if effects of properties thought to influence the timing of planning of elements within utterances are reflected in the prosodic phrasing and timing of the utterance.  This work is being conducted in collaboration with Neal Pearlmutter at Northeastern University and Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel at MIT.

A new line of work examines whether meaning relations among elements within an utterance can explain where speakers are likely to produce pitch accents within an utterance independent of syntactic differences. This work is being conducted in collaboration with Scott Fraundorf and Duane Watson at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.


Number Grammar and Number Cognition
This work examines how the primitive number system that can automatically enumerate up to three items serves as a precursor to the types of number agreement patterns observed in the world's languages.  We are also interested in how linguistic and perceptual aspects of number are processed by each hemisphere of the brain. This work is funded by a grant awarded to Kay Bock at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  You can read more about it here.


Gesture
This line of work aims to identify individual differences in general cognitive capacities that are predictive of gesturing during speech. This large-scale study will use individual difference measures to determine how a number of different cognitive factors may contribute to the production of co-speech gesture. This work is being conducted with Duane Watson and Kara Federmeier at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.


Planning of Complex Noun Phrases
It is largely unknown how far ahead speakers plan parts of their utterance (i.e., activate concepts/words/phoneme sequences) as they are speaking. What seems to be clear though, is that if speakers plan more of their utterance in advance, they will need to store these to-be-uttered elements in working memory prior to articulation. Together with Vic Ferriera (UCSD) and Florian Jaeger (University of Rochester), I am working on a project that examines to what extent individual differences in working memory capacity may influence the planning strategies speakers employ when describing complex scenes in a semi-naturalistic production task.