Publications

Recognition Memory as a Function of Word Slot and Contrastive Accenting in the Visual World Paradigm [in review; citation to come]

• This paper (a replication-extension of Fraundorf et al. 2010) establishes a link between pitch accenting, visual attention, and recognition memory in the VWP. We draw from previous theories regarding the processing of prosodic prominence and audiovisual stimuli to support a contrast-representation account of pitch accenting: contrastive-pitch accents divert limited working memory resources AWAY from non-accented contrastive alternatives, improving recognition memory for accented items.

Conferences

Oral Presentations
What Catches the Eye: Recognition Memory as a Function of Word Slot and Contrastive Accenting in the Visual World Paradigm

Access slides from HSP 2025 here!

• 38th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing (UMD, 2025)
• 7th Annual California Meeting for Psycholinguistics (UCSD, 2024)
• Southern California Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (UCLA, 2024)
• Linguistics Undergraduate Research Showcase (UCSB, 2024)
• Undergraduate Research Colloquium (UCSB, 2024)

Poster Presentations
The Impact of Modality and Cognitive Aging in Bilingual Lexical Access

• CoHRR Research Showcase (NYU, 2026)
• 39th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing (MIT, 2026)
  

What Catches the Eye: Recognition Memory as a Function of Word Slot and Contrastive Accenting in the Visual World Paradigm

• Undergraduate Research Colloquium (UCSB, 2024)

HSP 2026 @ MIT

HSP 2025 @ UMD

Ongoing Projects

Aging, Contrastive Prosody, and Memory

INDEPENDENT RESEARCH w/ NYU Communicative Sciences and Disorders Dept., CoMM Lab - 03.2025-Present

• I will serve as supervisor for a CSD MS student (Laisuna Yu) in her research thesis project, where she will extend my previous work on contrastive prosody into a population of older adults. She is interested in whether cognitive-resource allocation and memory will be impacted by cognitive aging!

Autism and Lexical Overlap in Parent-Child Dyads

NYU Communicative Sciences and Disorders Dept., LEARN Lab - 01.2026-Present

• Our team is working with existing corpus transcripts of parent-child conversations, and we plan to categorize and analyze different types of lexical overlap trends occurring in parents of neurotypical vs. neurodivergent children.

Acoustic Predictors of Dementia (ADRD) Onset

NYU Electric and Computer Engineering Dept., mLab - 12.2025-Present

• I consult for and help to design studies assessing acoustic-linguistic biomarkers of ADRD, where our team’s goal is to collect acoustic conversation data from a software-based system, comparing ADRD detection ability between this data and more traditional linguistic biomarkers of dementia. If effective, we can observe and rank classifier performance between between models incorporating linguistic biomarkers, acoustic biomarkers, and non-invasive network traffic patterns.

The Role of Context in Predictive Preactivation Across the Lifespan

INDEPENDENT RESEARCH w/ NYU Communicative Sciences and Disorders Dept., CoMM Lab - 09.2025-Present

• For my PhD research program, I am currently developing a series of studies which look at the role of conversational and contextual cues in language processing and memory for younger and older adults. These studies will be carried out via eye-tracking and EEG/ERP, and will ultimately be integrated into larger-scale cognitive-computational models of language use across the lifespan.
• I want to acknowledge that this project will be carried out in support from the National Science Foundation, as a GRFP fellow!

Bilingualism, Aging, and Lexical Access

NYU Communicative Sciences and Disorders Dept., CoMM Lab - 09.2025-Present

• I collected and analyzed eye-tracking data, differentiating lexical access mechanisms between younger and older Spanish-English bilinguals in spoken and written modalities. Our HSP 2026 poster provides preliminary evidence that older adults are able to compensate for temporal processing deficits and activate items slowly, but at proportions similar to younger adults, when provided with written (vs. spoken) cues.

Bilingualism, Contrastive Prosody, and Memory

INDEPENDENT RESEARCH w/ UCSB Linguistics Dept., PrPL Lab - 10.2024-Present

• I collaborated with Lu Liu (UCSB Linguistics, now OSU Linguistics) to extend my undergraduate thesis work into a population of Cantonese-English bilinguals.
• This ongoing study will pinpoint the acoustic qualities used to learn English in L1 tonal language speakers via a model-fitting approach.

Contrastive Prosody, Cognitive Resource Allocation, and Memory

INDEPENDENT RESEARCH w/ UCSB Linguistics Dept., PrPL Lab - 08.2023-Present

• I collaborated with Dr. Laurel Brehm (UCSB Linguistics) and Dr. Scott Fraundorf (Pitt Psychology) to expand Fraundorf et al. (2010), observing the relationship between contrastive-pitch accenting and memory in a visual-world eye-tracking paradigm.
• For my undergraduate thesis, I collected, cleaned, and analyzed eye-traclong data to establish causal links between contrastive prosody, fixation-mediated attention, and recognition memory. Most interestingly, I found that the effect of pitch accenting is diminished when encountered in a complex multimodal encoding environment. I also designed a set of 240 stimuli for use within the VWP, and authored a 34-page thesis to be developed for extensions and eventual publication (in review!).

Past Projects

Production and Perception of Language

UCSB Linguistics Dept., PrPL Lab - 08.2023-06.2025

• The MOXI science center in Santa Barbara was kind enough to partner with the PrPL lab, where I was part of our founding team promoting science communication and conducting real-world psycholinguistic research. My projects centered on the acquisition and usage of novel words in children and adults.
• In lab, I coded and analyzed speech errors in sentence-completion output and instructed undergraduate RAs in the use of portable and stationary eye-tracking equipment.
• After graduating, I maintained contact with the PrPL Lab and participated in a research initiative to enhance diversity in language science research using LLMs

Acquisition of Tonal Languages

UCSB Psychological and Brain Sciences Dept., Mayer Lab - 04.2023-06.2024

• Alongside native Mandarin speakers and trained opera singers, I developed grading scales for musical-pitch productions and second-language Mandarin utterances. Additionally, I served as psycholinguistic consultant in the scoring of basic Pinyin repetition in second-language Mandarin learners and conducted statistical analyses on the correlation between musical pitch ability and success in pitch-contour production in Mandarin.

Language of Trigger Warnings

UCSB English Dept., Literature and Mind Program - 07.2023-12.2023

• I reviewed the educational, political, and psychophysiological consequences of trigger warning usage, culminating in a 94-page literature overview alongside a well-attended campus presentation and Q&A session with the Trauma-Informed Pedagogy Initiative.