About

Dr. Catherine Pham is a language scientist interested in language production and how speakers plan their utterances, specifically in communicative contexts. She is also interested in which metrics of syntactic complexity best capture speaker adjustments in complexity and differences in syntactic abilities in both typical speakers, language learners, and clinical populations. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Purdue Aphasia Recovery Lab working with Dr. Jiyeon Lee.

After completing a B.A. in Linguistics at the university of Kansas, Catherine earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology and Language Science at the  Pennsylvania State University where her dissertation applied insights from the language comprehension and speech recognition literatures to explore how speakers adjust the syntactic complexity of their language production when speaking under adverse conditions (e.g., in the presence of background noise).