I delivered a talk at the Colóquio Internacional Amazónicas IX, an biennial conference on Amazonian languages, on requests and directives issued to children in Ticuna. Access the talk slides here.

My article ‘Tone, stress and their interactions in Cushillococha Ticuna’ was accepted for publication at Phonological Data & Analysis. The article abstract reads: Ticuna (ISO: tca; Peru, Colombia, Brazil) displays a larger tone inventory – five level tones – than any other Indigenous American language outside Oto-Manguean. Based on recent fieldwork, this article argues that, in […]

As part of a team with Claire Bowern (Yale) and students Sunny Ananthanarayan (Yale) and Sophie Pierson (UT Austin), I’m authoring two talks at the 2023 online meeting of the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas this Jan. 20-22. On Jan. 20, Sophie will present our first talk, “Where FLEx falls […]

My recent paper in Journal of Child Language, on acquisition of demonstratives, was quoted this month in several media outlets, including BBC Radio 6, the New York Post, and the Guardian. Read the Guardian piece here. 

At the Linguistic Society of America meeting in Denver, I gave a presentation titled “What causes the asymmetry between index and open-hand pointing in L1 acquisition?”. I was pleased to co-deliver this talk with my undergraduate student Alejandra González (Cornell). The abstract for this talk reads: For Western children, index-finger (IX) pointing gestures predict many […]

I delivered a keynote talk at the High Desert Linguistics Society (HDLS) meeting at the University of New Mexico on November 13. The talk was titled “Learning deixis: Interactional and multimodal analyses.” View the full slides on the conference OSF repository here. (Details: in the Files pane at bottom right, click the link to the […]

My article “Learning speaker- and addressee-centered demonstratives in Ticuna” was published at Journal of Child Language. The article abstract reads: This study investigated the acquisition of demonstratives (e.g., this/that, here/there) by 45 children (1;0 – 4;11) learning Ticuna, an Indigenous Amazonian language with an unusually complex demonstrative system. I analyzed 89 10-minute samples from video […]

With Karolin Obert (UT Austin), I coauthored a paper titled “Differential place marking beyond place names: Evidence from two Amazonian languages.” The article has been accepted at the open-access journal Glossa. The abstract reads: Not all spatial adjuncts behave alike. In some languages, certain spatial adjuncts display different marking or different combinatorial possibilities than others. Recent […]

As part of a series of research profiles of Klarman Fellows, the Cornell Chronicle profiled me here.

My article “Demonstratives and visibility: Data from Ticuna and implications for theories of deixis” appears in the December 2021 issue of Language. The article’s abstract reads: In many Indigenous languages of the Americas, demonstratives are said to encode whether the referent is visible. Some scholars, however, argue that all visibility meanings in demonstratives are epiphenomenal on […]