About me

I am a linguist working at the University of Munich (LMU). In my research, I combine psycholinguistic experiments, corpus analyses, and computational modeling to investigate language use, processing, and learning.

—– Recent books —–

• Structural priming in the grammatical network (2023), John Benjamins
• Constructionist approaches: Past, present, future (2023), with Stefan Hartmann, Cambridge University Press (Open Access)

—– Current projects —–

• Creative language processing: How do language users comprehend grammatically novel expressions, such as She timelined the project (noun-to-verb conversion) or He sneezed the napkin off the table (valency coercion)? (see our new paper on coercion here)
• Early reading acquisition: How can we combine experimental approaches and neural networks to optimize phonics instruction (i.e., how children are taught to map letters to sounds)?
(see our recent paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science)
• The evolution of linguistic innovations: How do social desires to stand out from one's peers ("extravagance") or blend in with others ("conformity") give rise to language change?

—– Other research interests —–

• Construction Grammar and cognitive-linguistic theory: Our Cambridge Element provides a concise introduction to constructionist approaches; and here I argue that "constructionhood" is gradient
• Priming as a window into grammatical representation: My monograph illustrates how structural priming can inform network models of grammar; here I present priming results between the English caused-motion and the resultative construction; and here I discuss how priming can be extended to new construction types
• Language as a network: See my theoretical piece (here) on why vertical and horizontal links in constructional networks are two sides of the same coin
• Creativity in language and language change: We have discussed the concept of linguistic extravagance (here) and its applications to (1) "snowclone" constructions in English (here) and crosslinguistically (here), and (2) German quantifiers and degree modifiers (here)