Graduate student, Linguistics
I am a fifth year PhD student in NYU’s linguistics department. I am interested in how the brain represents logical structures in language. In particular, I am interested in how the brain represents quantifiers, a topic that has been well studied by semanticists and philosophers of language throughout the centuries. Another interest of mine is how the brain processes referential expressions. When you hear a pronoun like “she,” what mechanisms allow you to retrieve a conceptual representation that corresponds to that pronouns’s referent? To address these questions, I make use of parallel presentation, which involves presenting entire sentences to subjects. This allows me to examine brain activity generated through the entire process of sentence comprehension. Before joining the linguistics department at NYU, I completed a BS and MS in computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where I aided in research aimed at parsing natural language queries into semantic representations for the purpose of instructing a data visualization system to build visualizations from user input.
