Research

My interests in linguistics lie at the intersection of acquisition, psycholinguistics, and formal theory, and I’m interested in a number of exciting questions. What is the structure of the human mind and how does a learner make sense of the input available? I am concerned with how particular developmental milestones can shed light on what children know about their grammar and what that knowledge means about the hypotheses children posit over the course of learning. At what age do children show evidence of respecting the crossover constraint? When are cross linguistic differences in islands detectable during development and from what do these differences arise? If islands are learnable from the child’s input, what is the relevant input they use? If islands are in fact a consequence of grammatical architecture, then why do some languages appear to have exceptions to these constraints? 

You can find my CV here.

Recent work:

Lee, E., Howitt, Katherine, Dixon, L., Ness, T., Nakamura, M., Muller, H., & Phillips, C. (2023) Alignment between adult and child predictive processing dynamics: Evidence from a gamified cloze study in a museum. (poster) The 36th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Howitt, Katherine, Dey, S., Sakas, W. G. (2021) Gradual syntactic triggering: the gradient parameter hypothesis. Language Acquisition, 28:1, 65-96, DOI: 10.1080/10489223.2020.1803329 pdf