Research

My work concerns syntax, the principles that govern the combination of words into phrases and sentences, and language acquisition, how children acquire their first language. Syntactic representations in spoken language are linked to both phonological representations and semantic representations. My work mainly concerns this latter interface. Syntax is important to understanding a wide variety of areas within human cognition, and is important for understanding how language is acquired, how the human sentence processor works and how language breaks down when brain damage occurs. My main research interests are in syntax, the syntax/semantics interface, and first language acquisition. I am also interested in psycholinguistics more generally, especially aspects of the psycholinguistics of sentence processing and the psycholinguistics of sociolinguistic variation. Click on the links below for more information on some of these areas.