My central, guiding research interest is in how the human brain perceives, encodes, represents, and processes language, with a particular focus on investigating syntactic comprehension. The data available to the traditional linguist, i.e. grammatical judgments, underdetermine linguistic theory. In this regard, I take the tools of neuropsychology, and of the neurosciences in general, to be requirements of the linguist's tool-belt today. I furthermore believe linguistic theory is the best tool currently available for those hoping to map the language areas and abilities of the brain, with psycholinguistic and neuroscientific data being necessary to confine the requisite problem space. The bifocal lenses of language development and language loss offer convergent insights into how the brain computes language. By focusing on a small class of syntactic structures that are relatively well-understood in linguistics, I aim to help clarify what role the brain plays in both typical and atypical language function.

My current graduate interest in neurolinguistics is a juxtaposition of my background in formal linguistics and the cognitive neurosciences. I took undergraduate degrees from the University of California at Berkeley in both linguistics and cognitive science, with my Ph.D. to follow in the summer of 2008 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, with a major in cognitive neuroscience and a minor in linguistics. This cross-discipline background and training offers a strong position from which to address and begin answering crucial questions in biolinguistics. My goal is the elucidation of the relationship of biology and experience in language acquisition and language loss, understood through the lens of current (Minimalist) linguistic theory.

My graduate work in the Wexler ab/Normal Language Laboratory looks to refine linguistic representation through analyses of how language develops and in what ways it can become impaired, through both language acquisition and aphasia studies. My dissertation focuses on disentangling the competing roles of experience and genetic influences on typical language development through a detailed investigation of children's acquisition of A-movement (passives, raising, and unaccusatives), while my work at the Harold Goodglass Aphasia Research Center looks into syntactic abilities of Broca's aphasics, and my recent collaborations with Dr. John Gabrieli investigate language processing in adults and children using fMRI.