When we go out into the world, we see a lot of things, but we don’t talk about everything we see and we certainly don’t talk about the same things in the same way!

My research on language production focuses on how we decide what it is we want to talk about and how we turn our conceptual representations of the world into a linguistic form that is suitable for the language we speak. To do this, my work brings together topics in event cognition, pragmatics, and theoretical linguistics. I study these processes in language production using visual world eye-tracking and other behavioral techniques in different languages.

I’m also the director of the Language, Events, and Mind (LEM) Lab. 

Interests

Message Generation

Sentence Formulation

Word Order

Event Structure

Pragmatics