I completed my PhD in 2007 at the University of California, San Diego, where I worked with Victor Ferreira. Currently, I am a NRSA postdoctoral research associate at Rice University, where I work with Randi Martin.

My research investigates the cognitive mechanisms underlying our ability to produce and comprehend language. I address this general issue with a variety of approaches, including behavioral experiments, studies of clinical populations with language deficits, functional neuroimaging studies, and comparative work on language and music. Most of my work falls within the following four topics:

Language production and working memory.

Speakers often must temporarily maintain ideas and lexical representations until they can be grammatically produced. My dissertation research investigated how this process relies on working memory, addressing a longstanding debate over the domain-specificity or generality of language processing. I showed that speakers' choices between syntactic structures are influenced by manipulations of domain-general verbal working memory, and that this did not result from dual-task demands. In current work with Randi Martin, I am looking at the sentence production patterns of brain-damaged patients with deficits in short-term memory and patients with deficits in inhibitory control. These relatively specific cognitive deficits should illuminate the specific type of memory representations and cognitive control mechanisms that underlie sentence production.

Language perception and auditory processing.

One of the most compelling and informative ways to learn about cognitive processes is to investigate how these processes go wrong. This motivates current work with a patient with verbal auditory agnosia (also called pure word deafness), a rare condition in which auditory speech comprehension is severely impaired despite otherwise preserved linguistic abilities and intact hearing. Patients with this deficit typically perform well with non-speech auditory stimuli (e.g., music and environmental sounds), so this has sometimes been taken as evidence for the unique nature of speech. However, it might instead result from a deficit in perceiving rapid temporal changes, which would disproportionately affect speech processing. I am investigating this by looking at the effectiveness of a treatment program that focuses on the processing of rapid temporal changes, and am also investigating issues of neural plasticity with pre- and post-training fMRI studies of speech and non-speech perception.

Speech errors and speech monitoring.

Of course, language processing can go wrong even in non-clinical populations, and I am interested in what this, too, can tell us about cognition. I have investigated conceptually related speech errors in normal participants and am currently investigating syntactic agreement errors in patients with short-term memory deficits. With Vic Ferreira, I showed that syntactic parsing is not an all-or-nothing process as corrected errors are not "erased," but rather persist to affect future processing. I have also looked at how we avoid making speech errors, and found that speakers' ability to use comprehended information to halt speech is sensitive to phonological but not semantic relationships. This constrains the perceptual loop theory by showing that self-monitoring does not operate entirely through comprehension-based processes.

Language and music.

Another way to investigate the role of domain-general processes in language is to compare language processing with processing in a domain with similar demands, such as music. In collaboration with Akira Miyake, I showed that individual differences in musical ability predict phonological proficiency in a second language, even after controlling for several other relevant factors. I have also demonstrated that harmonic processing in music, which can be characterized as a musical syntax, interacts with the processing of linguistic syntax (in work with Aniruddh Patel and Jason Rosenberg). This supports the theory that syntactic processing in language and music rely on shared cognitive mechanisms, and motivates current work investigating harmonic processing in patients with syntactic processing deficits.