Research Description

I am interested in young children's acquisition of syntax, especially how children learn about and from syntactic dependencies in language. Syntactic dependencies are abstract relationships between elements of a sentence, which makes them excellent tools for exploring a variety of issues in developmental psycholinguistics: for investigating children's developing structural knowledge and online processing abilities, and how children turn patterns in the linguistic input into grammatical rules. My undergraduate research explored 2.5 -year-olds' knowledge of constraints on the relationship between pronouns and their antecedents. More recently I have begun investigating children's acquisition of the grammatical dependency between a verb and its subject, focusing on their use of number agreement in comprehension.

Education

• B.A. in Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park