I recently completed my PhD in Experimental Psychology at the University of California, San Diego, where I worked with Vic Ferreira. Now, I am an NRSA postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Psychology at Rice University, where I work with Randi Martin in the Brain and Language Lab.

My research interests fit within three broad topics:

1. The role of non-language-specific cognitive mechanisms in language production.

In my dissertation research, I looked at how the accessibility of information in memory influences speakers' choices of syntactic structure and whether syntactic choices that are often considered to be communicatively based (i.e., given-new ordering) might actually result from speakers' more general cognitive strategies (i.e., general memory processes). I'm currently following this up from a cognitive neuropsychological perspective by looking at the sentence production patterns of brain-damaged patients with deficits in short-term memory and patients with deficits in inhibitory control.

2. The relationship between language and music.

Another way to address the way language interacts with other cognitive abilities is by comparing the processing of language and music. With Akira Miyake, I have looked at how musical ability is related to the acquisition of second language phonology, and I am currently working with Aniruddh Patel on a project investigating similarities in the processing of musical and linguistic syntax.

I'm also working with Diana Deutsch on questions of music perception and cognition more generally, in particular looking at the perception of certain musical illusions.

3. Speech errors and speech monitoring (error detection).

Research on language production has relied heavily on the study of errors, and I see no reason to depart from this venerable tradition. With Liane Wardlow Lane and Vic Ferreira, I'm investigating errors in semantic gender agreement (e.g., Bill gave a car to *her* daughter). In contrast to the considerable research addressing syntactic agreement, this type of error has received little attention.

I'm also curious about what happens to errors after they are corrected. That is, does hearing an error that gets corrected "erase" all traces of the error from your mind, or are you likely to still be affected by something you heard even if it was later changed? To address this issue, I'm looking to see if speakers will show structural priming from sentences that are halted and corrected.

But perhaps one of the most interesting things about speech errors is how uncommon they are. One widely held explanation for this is that we monitor our own inner speech through the language comprehension system, allowing us to detect and avoid errors. I've done some work testing this theory, which has provided some constraint on how speakers use comprehended information to halt speech. Also, Vic Ferreira, Erin Rogers and I have found evidence suggesting that self-monitoring is crucial for the detection of lexical ambiguity.

Other projects that don't fit neatly into these categories.

Joe McCleery, Lisa Tully, and I have worked to characterize the phonological development patterns of preverbal children with Autism, and Jeremy Boyd and I are investigating whether speakers' choices of word inflections are due to communicative factors, or to more general cognitive pressures on speakers.