Rm. 611 Psychology Bldg
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Dept of Psychology (WJ Brogden Hall)
1202 West Johnson Street
Madison, WI 53706-1696
E-Mail:
Phone: (608) 262-7346
Fax: (608) 262-4029
Graduate Student in Developmental Psychology
B.S. in Cognitive Science, 2001, Carnegie Mellon University
M.S. in Developmental Psychology 2004, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Research Statement:
I am a graduate student in the developmental area group working with Mark Seidenberg & Jenny Saffran. I am interested in exploring the domain general learning mechanisms that allow very young children to learn about their world. Language acquisition is an especially interesting and convenient domain in which to study these mechanisms. I am currently working on behavioral and computational studies that investigate how infants process linguistic stimuli which contain multiple overlapping patterns. In the wild, children must process speech that contains multiple patterns which overlap and vary in their consistency. While much research has focused on how children handle conflicting cues, little work has investigated processing of linguistic cues that are consistent with one another.
In a series of behavioral studies I am investigating how children and adults process linguistic stimuli that contain multiple patterns which act as cues to word boundaries. The goal of these studies is to understand how learners process inconsistent cues as well as use overlapping cues to their advantage. In my computational work I am investigating how regularities and patterns in the emerging lexicon affect acquisition of new words. In this work it is crucially important to examine patterns that emerge among both the acoustic labels and meanings of already acquired words.
