I am currently an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University at Buffalo,
where I lead the Language Processing and Computation Lab.
Broadly speaking, I am interested in what speech and prosody — the rhythm,
intonation, and intensity of speech — reveal about the cognitive mechanisms
that underlie language production, comprehension, and acquisition. An ongoing goal of mine has been to
develop computational models of language production and comprehension.
My latest research focuses on how listeners integrate information from a variety of cues,
and on how people learn to understand and produce constructions that are not already familiar to them
(e.g., new uses of prosody, pronunciations that are not native to their language, etc.).
Some of my past research has explored what durational changes reveal about the mechanisms
that underlie language production, how communicative context affects how
speakers use prosody, and how listeners use information from other levels of
language to parse prosodic structure.