Assistant Instructional Professor in Psychology
University of Chicago
Education
Ph.D. Comparative Human Development
University of Chicago | August 2022
B.A. Linguistics
University of Chicago | June 2010
My research explores how people coordinate in face-to-face interaction with more than just their words and how these conversational tools develop from infancy to adulthood.
I study the development of multimodal discourse across the lifespan. I examine the changing functions of co-speech gestures as children become collaborative conversationalists. Because language is much more than just speech, my work approaches language development as fundamentally multimodal as well. Why and when do children use gestures before words? What kinds of nonverbal messages are children sending when they speak? As adults, do we notice?
I teach general and introductory courses in psychology and the social sciences more broadly, including practical application of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods.
My research expertise allows me to teach intermediate and advanced coursework in first language development/acquisition, applied methods in observational and naturalistic data analysis, multimodal conversation, and the socialization of face-to-face interaction.
- Multimodality
- Language development
- Discourse-pragmatics
- Interactive gesture
- Parent-child interaction
- Observational corpora