I am a linguist interested in the relation between properties of language and the processes by which language is produced, understood, learned (e.g. by children), and lost (e.g. in language disorders, such as aphasia). I consider Linguistics and Cognitive Science to be closely connected. Patterns of language form and language usage can reveal aspects of the mechanisms underlying language production and comprehension. Conversely, many aspects of language form and language use can only be fully understood in relation to processes that give rise to them. Therefore, linguistic theory and analysis can fruitfully interact with cognitive explanations of linguistic phenomena.
A general hypothesis underlying my work is that our experience as speakers shapes the form of language, as well as the way we process language. For example, utterances we hear leave memory traces. Words that we hear or say often come to be processed differently - and to sound different - from words that we encounter only rarely. Because of this relation between language use and processing, I am particularly interested in effects of usage probabilities and frequencies, and in the probabilistic nature of grammar and language processing.
A lot of my work uses evidence from language production - specifically, pronunciation variation - to study language production and comprehension. My work on pronunciation variation challenges the traditional "grammar vs. usage" distinction, by showing that usage-based syntactic probabilities affect pronunciation, in a manner inconsistent with the traditional distinction. At the methodological level, my work combines psycholinguistic experimentation and corpus linguistic investigations.