Language is an instrument of human interaction used to share information in a variety of scenarios. How these systems develop across populations and how environment and input affect them, is incompletely understood. My interests are rooted in over 10 years of field work as an interpreter. My main areas of research are language development and processing in the Language Creation and Learning Lab with Dr. Annemarie Kocab. A great deal of my research involves the visual-manual modality of languages by investigating an emerging language only 50 years old in Nicaragua, Nicaraguan Sign Language, and American Sign Language in the U.S. Within these communities, we can explore the biological properties of language and the effects of the human experience.

Before entering the PhD program at Hopkins, I earned a master’s in applied linguistics and subsequently joined the Harvard Laboratory for Developmental Studies to work with Drs. Jesse Snedeker and Annemarie Kocab. We investigated questions related to language emergence, syntactic representations, and moment-to-moment comprehension. Specifically, I have worked on linguistic analyses (e.g., identifying the systems for argument marking and word order across modalities) and empirical neuroscience (e.g., the nature of predictive processing during language comprehension using EEG brain imaging).

In addition to my line of research, I engage in translation efforts and liaise research regarding the healthcare disparities affecting the American Deaf community.