Language is an instrument of human interaction, used to share information across a wide range of contexts. Yet how these systems develop across populations, and how environment and input shape them, remains incompletely understood. My interests are grounded in over ten years of fieldwork as an interpreter, and my research centers on language development and processing in the Language Creation and Learning Lab with Dr. Annemarie Kocab. I study how language diversity and environmental factors influence how humans perceive, process, and produce visual–manual languages, with particular interest in how the visual modality affects both linguistic structure and real-time processing.

I approach these questions by investigating American Sign Language, homesign systems, and Nicaraguan Sign Language. These communities provide a unique opportunity to examine how visual and cognitive constraints interact with language structure, and how perceptual mechanisms shape communication over time. Recently, my work has focused on visual perception—examining how people identify and discriminate phonological units.

Before entering the PhD program at Hopkins, I earned a master’s in applied linguistics and subsequently joined the Harvard Laboratory for Developmental Studies studying under Dr. Jesse Snedeker. There, we investigated questions related to language emergence, syntactic representations, and moment-to-moment comprehension. My work included linguistic analyses (e.g., identifying systems for argument marking and word order across modalities) and empirical neuroscience methods (e.g., EEG studies of real-time language processing). At Hopkins, I aim to build on this work by exploring how perceptual and cognitive constraints shape the structure and processing of visual languages.