#  About 

 



I'm an assistant professor in [Linguistics at Harvard University](http://linguistics.fas.harvard.edu/) where my research investigates the unique capacity that we have to understand an infinite number of sentences that we've never heard before (**semantics**), how we incorporate contextual information into these meanings (**pragmatics**), and how we ever learn to do this (**development**). I'm especially interested in what we can learn about linguistic meaning from **visual language**, both in full natural languages like American Sign Language and in co-speech gestures to spoken languages like English. My background is in math and theoretical linguistics, and in my research I make balanced use of theory for hypothesis creation with psycholinguistic experimental methods for gathering and analyzing data.