I am assistant professor and Annenberg Faculty Fellow in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford where I direct the Speech and Cognitive Development Lab. For the most detailed and up-to-date information about my research program, please explore our lab website.
Yes, I am recruiting students for my lab! We have openings for undergraduate research assistants, Ph.D. students, and a postdoc. I can accept prospective Ph.D. students through Linguistics and Computer Science. Just list my name as a potential advisor when you apply and I'll see your application. Postdoctoral applicants should submit application materials here. Undergraduate research assistants should submit an application here.
Research
Most recent CV available here.
My research asks how children learn to communicate, and how that process unfolds in different hearing or language environments (cross-culturally, among children who are deaf/hard-of-hearing). The lab's work falls into three strands:
- Developmentally. How do children master complex speech patterns during periods of rapid anatomical and cognitive change, and how similar are these trajectories from one child to the next?
- Cross-linguistically. How does early language development unfold across different languages and cultures? Children all over the world are exposed to very different early learning environments and language structures, and yet we find that all typically-developing children reach major language milestones.
- Experientially. How does sensory experience, especially childhood deafness, shape language learning? To understand this, we work with children who are deaf/hard-of-hearing as they learn spoken and sign language.
To address these questions, we combine techniques from natural language processing, psycholinguistics (especially eye-tracking), and in-situ fieldwork. Much of our recent work develops and validates automatic speech recognition and speaker diarization tools that let us learn from recordings made at home and in preschools. We also draw on the large archives of children's speech and language that researchers have collected over decades to study how children's language develops over the course of ordinary days. More recently, we have also been using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to study language processing in the developing brain.