Current Projects

Alignment in Language Production

It has long been observed that conversation partners align their behavior -- speech features, lexical choices, and syntactic choices align as speakers interact with each other. We are interested in the mechanisms by which this alignment takes place, and the characteristics of the speakers who elicit more alignment from their partners than others.

Elliptical Responses

Our responses to questions are often elliptical, leaving out linguistic content. For example, we might answer What time did you wake up? with 9 rather than saying I woke up at 9. We are exploring the cognitive and social factors that shape our choice to make an elliptical response (or not). In doing so, we hope to learn more about how memory factors, politeness, and linguistic conventions interact in shaping our utterances.

Spatial Demonstratives

Spatial demonstratives such as this and that are lexical items that allow us to identify objects in the space around us (this chair or that chair). We are currently investigating how this and that refer to the space around our bodies, with a particular focus on the hypothesis that the space covered by this is determined by our ability to reach and grasp the objects in our environment.