My main interests revolve around the interaction between language and other cognitive processes: How does language change the way we categorize and perceive the world? What non-communicative aspects of human behavior are impaired in cases of acquired language deficits such as aphasia? What kinds of thinking depends most on language? Asked another way: what aspects of human cognition were made possible or improved by the evolution of language?

Some of my and my colleagues' work on the subject of language and thought has been recently profiled in the New York Times: "When Language can Hold the Answer (NYT link) | (local link).

An additional interest of mine is trying to understand why language is the way it is by analyzing sociolinguistic factors. For example, how do languages vary as a function of whether they are used by a diverse population that includes adult learners of the language, or in a tightly-knit small group in which the language is acquired exclusively as a native language by infants.

I also have broad interests in neural coding, particularly the ways in which reentrant (or recurrent) neural processing gives rise to mental representations that are stable enough to be persist in time yet flexible enough to be dynamically modulated by current context and task demands.

Publications, Presentations, etc. | Vita | A Brief Bio - where did I come from? where did I go? | Description of Projects | Personal