About me

Hi! My name is Corrine and I’m a linguist interested in how language use shapes the way people produce and understand language. I explore these ideas primarily in the visual-gestural modality of signed languages (especially American Sign Language and Brazilian Sign Language) and in the gesture and speech of spoken languages. An important part of understanding the relationship between use and production/perception is figuring out how experience, including linguistic, sociocultural, and embodied experience, shapes language organization and structure.

My work falls into three related subfields. First, I work in usage-based construction grammar, where I investigate the phonological and grammatical construction of signed languages. Second, I work extensively on sociolinguistic variation and language change, where I investigate how social affiliation and language experience influence language use and language ideologies, and how ASL varies across communities in the US. Third, I use psycholinguistic methods to test signers’ sensitivity to resemblance between form and meaning in iconic mappings, and how the perception and processing of iconicity differ depending on a person’s language experience, sensory experience, and sociocultural experience within a community.