My paper “Countability in Ticuna” was accepted for publication at the open-access journal LIAMES/Línguas Indígenas Americanas, published in Brazil. The article is part of a special issue on the mass-count distinction in languages spoken in Brazil, edited by Suzi Lima (University of Toronto). The article abstract reads: This study examines the count-mass distinction in Ticuna (isolate). […]

At the annual business meeting of the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas on January 9, I received two awards: the Michael Krauss Archiving Award and the Mary R. Haas Book Award. The Archiving Award was given for my archival collections documenting Ticuna, while the Haas Award was given for my […]

I delivered a talk at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), titled “Children acquire non-egocentric demonstratives later than egocentric ones.” Abstract for the talk: Across languages, children produce demonstratives early in development, but do not master them until late. The late mastery of demonstratives is attributed to children’s cognitive egocentrism […]

I recently completed a manuscript titled “Anaphoric demonstratives occur with fewer and different pointing gestures than deictic demonstratives.” This manuscript is currently under review. The abstract is: Speakers often produce demonstratives, such as this/that and here/there, together with pointing gestures. However, little is known about what leads speakers to produce some demonstrative tokens with points, […]

On October 28, I presented an invited talk at Berkeley Linguistics’ Fieldwork Forum. The talk was titled “Fieldwork on Language in Social Interaction.” The abstract: This talk discusses how fieldworkers can collect data about language use in conversation and other forms of informal social interaction. First, I motivate the discussion by showing how data from […]

I’ve written a number of scripts to add functionality to the popular linguistic/media annotation application ELAN. These scripts are now publicly available, along with other resources I’ve created for using ELAN, on the ELAN Scripts page. If you’re after just the scripts, find the most recent versions at this Github repository. Resources are by me, […]

I presented a talk titled “Co-speech pointing gestures by Ticuna speakers: A corpus study” at the 2020 annual meeting of SSILA (Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas). Access the slides here.

On July 15, 2019, I started a two-year postdoctoral fellowship supported by the NSF SBE Postdoctoral Research Fellowship program. The project title is ‘Language acquisition and joint attention.’ During the project, I will be affiliated with Linguistics at UT Austin (sponsored by Pattie Epps) and with Language Development at the MPI for Psycholinguistics (sponsored by […]

I filed my dissertation, titled ‘Spatial and non-spatial deixis in Cushillococha Ticuna,’ in June 2019. The dissertation is available open access via UC eScholarship here.