Hi!
I'm a fifth year PhD student in the Linguistics department at the University of Maryland, where I'm also part of the Language Science Center. Broadly, I'm interested in meaning, its acquisition, and the relationship between linguistic and conceptual structure. More narrowly, my research uses a range of methods including psycholinguistic experiments, psychophysical modeling, and corpus analysis to identify formal differences in the mental representations of logically equivalent expressions and show how these differences affect the interface between language and non-linguistic conceptual systems. I'm advised by Jeff Lidz and Paul Pietroski.
Research Projects
Universal Quantifiers:

Collaborators: Jeff Lidz, Paul Pietroski, Justin Halberda, Alexander Williams
Precursors of Quantification in Infancy:

Collaborators: Nicolò Cesana-Arlotti, Jeff Lidz, Justin Halberda
Majority Quantifiers:

(1) most of the dots are blue.
(2) more of the dots are blue.
But while (1) calls for comparing the number of blue dots to the total number of dots, (2) calls for comparing the blue and yellow dots directly. My collaborators and I argue that these subtle differences in meaning influence how adults and children expect visual scenes to look (e.g., given (1), they create pictures like A but given (2), they create pictures like B), what information they remember from those scenes (they encode only the set of blue dots given (1) but encode both blue and yellow given (2)), and how easily they are able to judge the sentence as true (evaluating (2) is easier, since direct comparisons introduce less noise than proportional comparisons). Together, these effects demonstrate that more and most have discoverable decompositional mental representations that are (at least largely) shared across speakers of English at a fine-grained level of representational detail. We've recently started to extend these predictions to Cantonese majority quantifiers as well.
Collaborators: Darko Odic, Alexis Wellwood, Tim Hunter, Yu'an Yang, Elaine Lau, Jeff Lidz, Paul Pietroski, Justin Halberda
Event Concepts & Syntactic Bootstrapping:

Collaborators: Laurel Perkins, Mina Hirzel, Jeff Lidz, Alexander Williams
Pre-UMD: Before coming to Maryland I studied Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins. I managed Justin Halberda's Vision lab and learned a lot about the Approximate Number System. I was also fortunate enough to work with Akira Omaki and Emily Atkinson on a project investigating the relationship between working memory and parsing.
Output
Papers
Talks
Posters
Teaching & Mentoring
Courses instructed:
Spring 2020: Language and Thought (LING449T)Does language shape cognition? Do the details of our native language(s) determine how we perceive the world? Can learning language give us access to new concepts? In this course, we’ll explore these questions through case studies, including color categorization, spatial frames of reference, navigation, theory of mind, event representations, and number. Along the way, we’ll discuss the nature of concepts as well as ways that linguists can leverage the relationship between language and thought to study natural language meaning.
Courses TAed:
Fall 2019: Grammar and Meaning (LING410; Instructor: Valentine Hacquard)Spring 2019: Child Language Acquisition (LING444; Instructor: Jeffrey Lidz)
Fall 2018: Language and Mind (LING240; Instructor: Tonia Bleam)
Spring 2018: Introductory Linguistics (LING200; Instructor: Tonia Bleam)
Mentoring
At UMD, I've served as the mentor for undergraduate research assistants Mac Lauchman, Mariam Aiyad, Divya Lahori, Taylor Hudson, Meagan Griffith, Stuti Deshpande, and Aja Boyer, and as the mentor for high school intern Simon Chervenak, who won the Washington Academy of Science's award for Best Paper in Behavioral Sciences.Contact Info
Check out what my awesome cohort at UMD Ling is up to:
Sigwan Thivierge, Mina Hirzel, Anouk Dieuleveut, Aaron Doliana, and Rodrigo Ranero.