About

I am a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Language Learning and Meaning Acquisition (LLAMA) at Purdue University, where I am advised by Dr. Arielle Borovsky. I earned a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During my graduate degree, I worked with Professors Cynthia Fisher and Renée Baillargeon. My dissertation explored the role of event representations in children’s reference comprehension. Before joining UIUC, I also recieved a M.Sc. in Psychology from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. My masters thesis was advised by Dr. Mark Sabbagh and explored the role of inhibitory control in preschoolers’ use of irregular past tense verb forms.

I am interested in how children represent events and how they use those event representations in online language comprehension and word learning. In particular, my research asks questions about how we integrate linguistic knowledge with knowledge of real world referents to understand the messages that speakers are trying to convey.

I am also interested in infants’ ability to represent the mental states of others, as well as how these mental state representations become elaborated and integrated with other cognitive processes across development.