I’m interested in how people use language to create meaning in communication, particularly the ways they connect ideas within sentences and between paragraphs. My research explores how people recognize these so-called discourse relations, and how people might differ from each other in their ability to do so. This line of research contributes to building cognitive models of how language is processed and represented in the mind, and it helps to improve computational models of discourse. I primarily use quantitative empirical methods, including online and offline experimentation as well as corpus analysis.

I was recently awarded the Veni grant for my project titled "Searching for Meaning: Uncovering Discourse Structure Signals in Language". This project investigates how discourse relations are expressed naturally in written language (through connectives and other lexical elements), spoken language (through prosodic stress) and visual language (through gestures). 

In addition to being interested in theoretical issues in psycholinguistics, I’m also interested in issues related to research design and methodology, particularly annotation procedures, crowdsourcing designs, and novel experimental methods.