Research Areas

This is a narrative summary of how different lines of research tie together.

Pragmatic communication and convention formation

A primary interest is how context (social, visual, linguistic, etc) influences how we produce and process language. My dissertation work in graduate school focused on using the iterated reference game paradigm as a model system and looking at how patterns of convention formation varied across different situations.

In Interaction Structure Constrains the Emergence of Conventions in Group Communication, I explored how most of the signatures of convention formation observed in dyads scale up to small groups and still occur (to some extent) even with limited communication channels. Expanding the paradigm in a different direction, Preschoolers can coordinate with each other to communicate about novel referents looks at how 4-5 year old preschoolers are able to coordinate with each other in a simplified iterated reference game.

In ongoing work, Refbank pulls together a number of iterated reference game datasets to create a resource for re-analysis and study how the different features of the experimental design space (modality, group structure, stimuli, number of targets, etc) moderate the process of convention formation.

I’m interested in how “transparent” or “opaque” the conventions formed in reference games are to overhearers, and whether having access to the lead-up in conversational context helps an overhearer match the target to the referring expression. In this “overhearer” framework, I’ve looked at both how adults and how vision language models do at matching the target with different amounts of context.

Reference games crystallize out one aspect of language – reference – but reference is more commonly embedded in more complex speech acts to achieve other goals. I’ve worked on how linguistic conventions might form and be helpful in strategic games. I went on an (unsuccessful) side quest looking into the role of linguistic communication for coordination (or negotiation) in 2x2 game theory games. I still think that linguistic conventions are probably relevant to coordination in complex settings, but unfortunately, it’s difficult to elicit experimentally.

Replication side projects

I was a teaching assistant for PSYCH 251 (graduate class in research methods) for a couple years and alongside that worked on analysing class replication projects for metascience. The first year I did a retrospective analysis of all the prior replication projects, and the second year, students had the option to do a re-replication project where they attempted to “rescue” a previously unsuccessful replication, and we wrote up the results. More recently, I’ve contributed to the Handbook on Conducting Reproduction and Replication Studies.

Peekbank and other developmental psychology side projects

I joined the peekbank team when I started graduate school, and I participated on-and-off in data importing and hackathons during graduate school. In my postdoc, I’ve been heavily involved in code review on the datasets, and using peekbank to determine what analytic decisions will wring the most signal (in terms of reliability and validity) out of the noisy child data.

I contributed some robustness checks to the Many Babies 1 CDI spin-off and am involved in the analysis plan and power analysis simulation for Many Babies 6.

In another developmental methods side project, I worked on a meta-analysis comparing in-person and online data collection for developmental studies.

Maze

My pre-grad school work was focused on psycholinguistics, in particular sentence processing. I focused on methods devleopment, adapting the Maze paradigm to work on the web and to have automated distractor generation. Both web experiment deployment and (especially) language model technology has evolved in the past few years (while I’ve mostly been doing other research in grad school), so both the Maze front-end experiment display and back-end distractor generation are due for overhauls. Conveniently, my postdoc is about using Maze (and possible other methods) to do online sentence processing with children, so I’ll be working to fix up the methods infrastructure.

My work on Maze includes an initial paper on the Maze method with targeted sentences and a follow-up using naturalistic stimuli. There’s (out-of-date) documentation on Maze.