Hi I’m Katherine!
I am a linguist and a computer scientist. Currently, I am a PhD Student in Linguistics at the University of Maryland where I’m advised by Dr. Jeff Lidz and Dr. Colin Phillips. Broadly, I am interested in language acquisition and psycholinguistics.
I have a number of ongoing projects including looking at four year olds knowledge of strong crossover, school age children’s behavior in the speeded cloze paradigm, 19-month-old’s knowledge of argument vs. adjunct questions, and the usefulness of large language models in language acquisition.
At Maryland, I’m part of an exciting linguistics cohort: Joselyn Rodriguez, Jingyi Chen, London Dixon , Fëdor Golosov, Zulfiyya Aghakishiyeva.
Before coming to Maryland, I was an adjunct lecturer in the Computer Science department at Hunter College, where I was also the Lab Manager for the Computational Language Acquisition Group (COLAG) under the direction of Dr. William Sakas. I completed my B.A. in Psychology and Linguistics at Columbia University and my M.A. in Linguistics at the CUNY Graduate Center with a focus on learnability and syntactic acquisition.
For many years, I ran an academic consulting business where I worked with high school and college students on organizational and study skills, as well as tutoring in a range of academic areas. I formerly served on the Board of Directors for FeelGood, a nonprofit youth movement dedicated to ending chronic poverty. My hobbies include hiking, writing poetry, list making, and spending time with Catstopher (pictured here).