Research

I'm currently a post-doctoral researcher in the Laboratory for Language Development at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Saitama, Japan. My research is focused on understanding early phonological and lexical learning. How do children learn the phonemic categories of their language, and how do they segment the continuous speech stream they hear into discrete words? I am exploring ways to answer these questions by building computational models of the process and testing those models experimentally.

I am also interested in how a language's lexicon changes over time; specifically, how a word's phonological properties affect that word's ability to survive and spread in a speech community. The first chapter of my dissertation is a good introduction to my work in this area.

Download my CV here: [pdf]

Updated September 2010