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.
My research aims to address the question, `How do children learn the grammar of their language on the basis of the input available to them, and what does the character of their knowledge tell us about the representations of grammar in the mind?'. I approach this question using a broad range of methods including behavioral studies with children and adults and computational studies that probe the abilities of various language models.
My recent projects focus on A’ movement and the properties that cluster across constructions. I have a number of ongoing projects including looking at four year olds knowledge of strong crossover, the usefulness of large language models in understanding island effects and crossover effects, reconstruction in parasitic gap constructions, 19-month-old’s knowledge of argument vs. adjunct questions, and children’s abilities with epistemic and non-epistemic reasoning.
At Maryland, I’m part of an exciting linguistics cohort: Joselyn Rodriguez, Jingyi Chen, London Dixon , Fëdor Golosov.
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).
You can contact me at kghowitt (at) umd (dot) edu