I study language use in interaction across cultures and the lifespan. This focus leads to interests in first language acquisition, pragmatics, and language documentation.

All of my research is based on my own fieldwork in the Amazon Basin, where I have spent over 26 months working with speakers of Ticuna (isolate; Peru, Brazil, Colombia) and other Indigenous languages, such as Máíhɨ̃ki (formerly known as Orejón; Tukanoan; Peru). Because these languages are endangered and underdescribed, I complement my core research on deixis and language development with studies of phonology, morphology, and syntax.

Child Language

• Flibl: A tool to ease transfer between ELAN and FLEx [child language research software). Under review. Joint work with Sophie Pierson (UT Austin), Sunny Ananthanarayan (Yale/University of Washington) and Claire Bowern (Yale).
  • Download the tool here.
  • Read a preprint (of our manuscript describing the tool) here.
• Digital infrastructure and its impacts on language work: A case study of FieldWorks Language Explorer. Under review. Joint work with Sophie Pierson (UT Austin), Sunny Ananthanarayan (Yale/University of Washington) and Claire Bowern (Yale). Preprint here.
• 2023. What causes the asymmetry between index and open-hand pointing in L1 acquisition? Linguistic Society of America presentation with Alejandra Gonzalez (Cornell undergraduate student). Slides here.
• 2023. Learning speaker- and addressee-centered demonstratives in Ticuna. Journal of Child Language 50(3) 632-661. Open access here.

Semantics & Pragmatics Research with Adults

Deixis

• Anaphoric demonstratives occur with fewer and different pointing gestures than deictic demonstratives. Under review; preprint here.
• The deictic content of demonstratives [invited review article]. Under review; preprint here.
• 2021. Demonstratives and visibility: Data from Ticuna and implications for theories of deixis. Language 97(4): 793-824. Open access here.
• With David Peeters. 2021. Cross-linguistic differences in demonstrative systems: Comparing spatial and non-spatial influences on demonstrative use in Ticuna and Dutch. Journal of Pragmatics 180: 248-265. Full text available open access courtesy MPI for Psycholinguistics.
• 2019. Spatial and non-spatial deixis in Cushillococha Ticuna. Ph.D. dissertation, UC Berkeley.

Other Topics

• 2021. Countability in Ticuna. LIAMES: Línguas Indígenas Americanas 21: 1-20. Open access here.
• 2018. Tenselessness and aspect in Cushillococha Ticuna. Manuscript available here.

Language Documentation & Description

• 2023. Tone, stress, and their interactions in Cushillococha Ticuna. Phonological Data & Analysis 5(5). Open access here.
• 2022. With Karolin Obert. Differential place marking beyond place names: Evidence from two Amazonian languages. Glossa 7(1). Open access here.
• 2021. Ticuna (tca) language documentation: A guide to materials in the California Language Archive. Language Documentation & Conservation 15: 153-189. Open access here.
• 2017. Phonology and nominal morphology of Cushillococha Ticuna. Ph.D. dissertation prospectus, UC Berkeley. Available here, but mostly superceded by the Phonological Data & Analysis paper cited above.
• 2017. Three speakers, four dialects: Documenting variation in an endangered Amazonian language. Language Documentation and Conservation SP13: 94-115. Open access here.
• 2017. Assertive questions in Máíhɨ̃ki. Journal of Pragmatics 109: 121-136. Closed access, but final published version available here.
• 2016. Esoteric morphology: vocable affixes in Máíhɨ̃ki shamanic song. Proceedings of CILLA VII. Open access here.
• 2016. Meter without feet. Ph.D. qualifying paper, on metrics in a genre of traditional verbal art. MS available here.
• 2014. Grammatical sketch of Northern Máíhɨ̃ki. MS available here; most accessible in combination with chh. 1-3 of Farmer (2015).

Archival Deposits [all open access]

• Contributions to Materials of the Berkeley Máíhɨ̃ki Project, Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, UC Berkeley, SCL 2013-02, doi:10.7297/X2DR2SGD
  • Several hundred audio recordings of stories, landscape descriptions, oral history/autobiography and other primarily monologic texts.
  • ~250 time-aligned text transcripts.

Community Materials

• 2014. Tótòyà dóéàkɨ̀nà máí / Los antepasados del Tótoya (Ancestors of the Clay River). 113pp. collection of Northern Máíhɨ̃ki traditional oral literature texts. Compiled by me; texts and color illustrations by Máíhɨ̃ki speakers and descendants. Interlinear in Spanish.

Historical Linguistics

• From 2014 to 2016, I worked as a research assistant to Lev Michael on the MPI for History and the Sciences project “A lexical database of Tukanoan and other northwest Amazonian languages.” This project, which I helped to design, assembled a large pan-Tukanoan lexical database to support new work on the internal classification of the family using traditional and computational methods.
• My BA thesis on classification and reconstruction in Western Tukanoan is here.
• Previously, I worked as a research assistant in Claire Bowern’s Pama-Nyungan Languages Lab at Yale, where I contributed to the Grambank database () as a coder. My authorships related to this work include:
  • “Noun classes” in the Oxford Guide to Australian Languages (in press). Preprint available here; the final published version is available closed access here.
  • Author 85 of 105 on the following paper: 2023. Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss. Science Advances 9(16). Open access here.