Embedded Files
Ph.D., University of Michigan
M.S., University of Michigan
B.S., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Email: vernooij (at) umich (dot) edu
Wildflowers in the Andes Mountains, Baños, Ecuador
Welcome! I'm Natasha.
I'm a quantitative cognitive researcher specializing in behavioral data analysis and AI-driven language modeling. By combining advanced statistical expertise with human behavioral data and artificial language models, I explore the cognitive processes that shape how we understand the world. I'm excited to bring my research experience into an industry setting.
I recently earned my PhD in psychology from the University of Michigan, where I worked with Dr. Rick Lewis and Dr. Julie Boland. My research focused on bilingual cognition, specifically, how bilinguals navigate conflicts between their grammars and how AI language processing compares to human language processing. I examined how bilinguals interpret codeswitches in contexts where grammatical structures differ, such as adjective-noun word order in Spanish and English. To explore these questions, I used corpus analyses, acceptability judgment tasks, and reading time experiments, comparing human performance to large language model (LLM) performance on the same tasks.
I actively support open science practices, and you can find my research, including methods, stimuli, data, and code, on GitHub and OSF. I am particularly interested in projects that reduce barriers to being involved in research.
Outside of work, you can find me in the ceramics studio or spending time with my cats, Pumpkin, Pips, and Zero.
About Me
About Me
My interest in language started early: my parents immigrated to the U.S. from the Netherlands and they taught me to speak Dutch so that I could talk with my family. In elementary school, I started taking Spanish classes and continued my Spanish education and eventually majored in Hispanic Linguistics at UNC-Chapel Hill. My interest in psychology developed in high school when I took my first psychology class. In undergrad, I worked in various labs (the Carolina Affective Science Lab with Dr. Kristen Lindquist, the Language, Cognition, and Brain Lab with Dr. Peter Gordon, and the Bergelson Lab with Dr. Elika Bergelson) and majored in Psychology. In grad school, I combined my interests in bilingualism and psychology to research how bilinguals use both of their languages.
You can also find me on:
You can also find me on:
Page updated
Report abuse