At the University of Maryland I was heavily involved in language science outreach work, aiming to share language science with the general public (especially children). We particularly focused on approaches that would use language science questions or data to work through the scientific process interactively, showing children that science is a method rather than the small sample of topics that are generally covered in elementary and middle school science classes. We also aimed to design activities that would be interactive and allow children to work through that scientific process, including developing and refining hypotheses. Further, our goal was to introduce the idea that diversity in language use is a good thing that should be celebrated -- scientists are interested in studying these differences between people descriptively.

Resources that we developed are available on OSF and our published paper is available open-access.

Publications and presentations arising from this work:

• Salig, L., Exton, E., Thorburn, C. & Krauska, A. (2025). Conveying psycholinguistic concepts to general audiences: An interactive, problem-solving approach. Special-session poster presented at the Human Sentence Processing conference, College Park, MD, March.

• Oppenheimer, K., Salig, L.*, Thorburn, C.* & Exton, E.* (2022). Taking language science to Zoom school: Virtual outreach to elementary school students. Language and Linguistics Compass, 16(9), e12471. doi: 10.1111/lnc3.12471.

• Oppenheimer, K., Dixon, L.*, Exton, E.*, Krauska, A.*, Salig, L.* & Thorburn, C.* (2022). Clinicians as STEMpowered professionals: Using speech and language science for community and career outreach. Talk presented at the American Speech Language and Hearing Association Convention, Virtual, November.

• Exton, E.*, Oppenheimer, K.*, Salig, L.*, & Thorburn, C.* (2022). Linguistics goes to Zoom school: Engaging children in virtual outreach. Talk presented at the Linguistic Society of America, Washington DC, January.

* denotes equal authorship