Welcome
I’m a field linguist and linguistic anthropologist, meaning that I study how people use language in interaction across cultures. I’m especially interested in child-caregiver interaction, language acquisition, pragmatics (word meaning in context), and documentation of endangered and Indigenous languages.
All of my research is based on my own fieldwork – I have conducted over 26 months of fieldwork in the Amazon Basin with speakers of two Indigenous languages, Ticuna (isolate) and Máíhɨ̃ki (Tukanoan). Read more about my work on the Research page.
I am Chancellor’s Fellow in Linguistics & English Language at the University of Edinburgh. This is a research-intensive tenure-track position. I’ve also held research positions at Cornell and UT Austin and been a guest researcher in the Language Development Department at MPI Nijmegen. I received my PhD from Berkeley Linguistics in 2019.
Contact Me
Reach me via email at askilton at ed.ac.uk.