Neural bases of language comprehension
As we listen to someone speak, comprehension usually feels quick and effortless. Yet under the hood, the brain performs a range of complex, interconnected processes to turn the auditory signal into meaningful representations.
In my postdoctoral work at Stanford University, I aim to uncover how these representations arise in the brain, and how they interact with each other and with other cognitive systems such as memory and attention.
In particular, I address how the brain tracks the speaker’s prosody - changes in pitch and intensity over time - to predict when they are about to say something new or surprising, and how this influences processing of that information and its encoding into memory. This work advances neural models of language processing, which have typically ignored prosody as a salient, powerful cue for comprehension. This project is funded by a K99/R00 award from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.
I am very thankful for the opportunity to study these questions through intracranial EEG collected from epilepsy patients, who generously volunteer for cognitive science experiments during standard-of-care epilepsy monitoring prior to surgery.
Temporal prediction in language
The brain is always predicting what will happen next. But it is also always predicting when things will happen, a concept called temporal prediction.
Spoken language unfolds over time, so it's important for us to predict not only which words we're likely to hear, but also when we are likely to hear them. How does our brain do that?
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One possibility is that the brain tracks fluctuations in the acoustic signal of speech as if they were musical beats (see my review). In a collaborative opinion paper we argued that to better understand the role of neural tracking of speech for comprehension there needs to be more interdisciplinary collaboration across the fields of signal and sentence processing. On the other hand, the brain might use other, non-rhythmic cues to deploy attention to the timing of important words.
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I addressed these two potential temporal prediction mechanisms in my postdoctoral research at UC Davis, funded by an NRSA F32 award from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Surprisingly, we found evidence against the common view that domain-general attention is pre-allocated to the timing of focused words (see our 2026 paper), as measured through alpha-band oscillations in EEG. Instead, preparatory attention predicted how people processed words and how well they remembered them later. Ongoing work tests how this preparatory attention interacts with cortical tracking induced by rhythmic speech patterns.
Information structure in language comprehension and production
Not all information is created equal: in a sentence, some words are more important or meaningful than others. How do people focus their attention on these meaningful words?
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Speakers can mark important words prosodically - for example, through a strong accent (YOU forgot the keys, not ME!). Or, they can use particular syntax (It was you who forgot the keys, not me!). How do people rely on these different types of cues?
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I studied this and related questions in my doctoral dissertation by tracking peoples' eye-movements as they read and listened to sentences (preprint), and I published a successful replication of a study by Cutler and Fodor (1979) on this topic.
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I also investigated how speakers use prosody to focus important words when they talk to voice-activated Artificially Intelligent devices like Amazon's Alexa, in collaboration with colleagues in linguistics (see our 2025 paper).
Cross-cultural perspectives in music cognition
What do you feel when you hear a song from a far-away culture? You might not be familiar with the style - maybe the scale is different, maybe it uses unusual rhythms. Yet you might still be moved by it.
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What allows people to enjoy music from other cultures? Does music around the world share common features in the way it communicates emotion?
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I asked this question in my paper on chills - strong emotional responses felt as a shiver down the spine - in response to music across cultures. More broadly, I am interested in cross-cultural perspectives in the study of music cognition.
Learn more about these project and find a full list of publications, conference talks and posters on my CV page!