I am a linguist, word nerd, data wrangler, and conversation designer.
As I used to tell my students, I'm primarily interested in words, word bits, and word meanings, whether we're learning them or using them in a social context. I use quantitative and qualitative methods to gain insight into the makeup and entries of our mental dictionary, as well as how we learn and process morphemes and their associated meanings. I'm particularly interested in Semitic morphology and how social factors like language contact, language dominance, and bilingualism influence morphosyntactic borrowing and learning.
I apply my research expertise and interests in language in many ways, like conducting research to find out how and why people are using products, analyzing and visualizing data, and ensuring you can have a more natural conversation with a contact center rep or chatbot. I love analyzing how language works (or doesn't work!) in social settings and seeing what makes people tick—and in turn, use those findings to improve the products I work on.
I'm still affiliated with the University of Oregon with a courtesy research appointment, so I am still conducting lab research and publishing my findings. I even have a textbook coming out soon that I wrote with a couple of colleagues—if you'd like to have a broad and approachable introduction to sociolinguistics with some easter eggs involving our animal companions, keep an eye out for it!
I received my Ph.D. in 2018 from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. My dissertation examined whether differing levels of experience affects how people from different language backgrounds learn root-and-pattern morphology—does speaking Arabic or Maltese help? (Spoiler alert: it doesn't—but you produce different errors!) I'm still interested in how we learn language and how the languages that we speak affect each other.
I moved to Eugene, OR in the fall of 2021 with an NSF fellowship to conduct research full time. I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Speech Perception & Production Lab (PI: Melissa M. Baese-Berk) at the University of Oregon. I continued to investigate different cognitive factors that help you learn a new language, and further developed my interests in speech perception, speech production and—yes, really—how language is used in men's professional ice hockey.
I also conduct research on whether we can use machine learning to predict the form of a broken plural in Maltese, the effects of working memory on auditory L2 sentence comprehension, and whether the Distributed Morphology framework is a good model of language processing in addition to being a good model of offline grammar. You can read more about these projects on my Research page, and send me an email if you're interested in hearing more.