Assistant Professor The core question of my research is: How does the brain – an organ that is virtually the same across the species – manage to learn, use, and understand languages – which can be very different? Much of this research uses behavioral and electrophysiological (EEG/MEG) techniques to investigate how language users understand words and sentences moment-by-moment. This research is guided by insights from theoretical syntax/semantics, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. I also have a special interest in the languages of South Asia (Bengali, Hindi, Nepali). Recent projects investigate understanding patterns of brain activity associated with understanding case in split ergative languages (Hindi & Nepali), brain activity associated with processing morphologically complex words (Bengali), the role of world knowledge and compositional semantics in processing wh-dependencies (English), and the temporal dynamics of the neural language network while reading short sentences in one eye gaze (English). Personal website Research Areas of Interest: Semantics Syntax and Morphology Specific Research Areas: Predictive processing, syntactic processing, morphological processing, South Asian languages, case and agreement, filler-gap dependencies
