I'm a grad student at MIT's Department of Brain and Cogntive Sciences. My committee consists of Ted Gibson, Laura Schulz, Jesse Snedeker, and Josh Tenenbaum. I study language acquisition, and I am especially interested in exploring how insights from cognitive development and computational approaches inform our understanding of the language learning process.

More specifically, I am interested in how children (and adults) use syntactic structures to make inferences about what sentences mean. I study how children use their conceptual and linguistic representations of causation to make inferences about particular events in the world, and about the meanings of syntactic structures such as the transitive (Jane broke the lamp) and periphrastic causative (Jane made the lamp break) in their native language. I'm also interested in event representations in early development, and pragmatics in early langauge production.

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