Pragmatics, speaker knowledge, and misinformation.
My recent experimental work investigates how listeners use assumptions about speaker knowledge when interpreting utterances. This research asks whether pragmatic inferences are computed automatically, contextually licensed, or shaped by default assumptions about what speakers know. A central goal is to understand how people reason about meaning in communicative environments where speakers may be ignorant, unreliable, or only partially informed.

Language, measurement, and nominal meaning.
A second strand of my research examines how natural language represents number, quantity, comparison, and measurement. This work includes research on mass/count syntax, classifiers, plural marking, proportional measurement, comparatives, and expressions such as many, few, and per. Across these projects, I use formal semantic tools to ask how grammar interfaces with conceptual systems for individuation, quantity, and measurement.

Language acquisition and cognitive development.
In collaboration with David Barner and Language Development Lab, I investigate how children acquire the ability to reason about meaning, quantity, and communication. This work combines experimental methods from developmental psychology with formal theories from semantics and pragmatics to explore topics such as scalar implicature, speaker knowledge, quantification, conditionals, and the mass-count distinction. A central goal is to understand how children integrate linguistic structure with broader cognitive capacities, including reasoning about alternatives, intentions, knowledge states, and numerical concepts. More broadly, this research uses developmental evidence to evaluate competing theories of meaning and inference, while also using linguistic theory to illuminate the cognitive foundations of language learning.

Digital tools for language documentation and low-resource language research.
I am also developing digital infrastructure for linguistic fieldwork, language documentation, and collaborative research. Earlier work with Joel Dunham contributed to platforms such as Dative for organizing and sharing linguistic fieldwork data. More recently, in collaboration with Noah Diewald, I am leading the development of Menkayonta, an open-source research platform for elicitation, corpus construction, interlinear glossed text management, metadata organization, and secure storage.

A central goal of Menkayonta is to bridge online and offline research environments. The platform is being designed so that researchers and community collaborators can work locally in areas with limited or unreliable internet access, while still supporting synchronization, distributed collaboration, and eventually peer-to-peer data sharing. This work connects directly to my IVADO-supported project, “Collaborative Generative Databases for Understudied Languages,” which aims to develop accessible computational tools for organizing, searching, managing, and eventually using AI-assisted methods with data from Indigenous, endangered, and other low-resource languages.

Mi’gmaq and collaborative language research.
The Mi’gmaq Research Partnership has explored the grammar of Mi’gmaq, a northeastern Algonquian language, while also supporting community-based language documentation and revitalization. This research has included work on person and number, classifiers, evidentiality, semantic agreement, and the development of digital tools and resources for collaborative linguistic research.