Background
When I was five, I ran away from kindergarten. The lock that appeared on the gate to the kindergarten the next day make me realize that I best stay in academia. And so I did.
I was born in Germany and my parents and I emigrated to the United States when I was almost 10. At that time, I only spoke German, and I was put into a pull-out ESL class to learn English. This resulted in me becoming bilingual and bicultural, two identities which have shaped my professional life.
When I was 17, I became an exchange student and spent a year living in Hong Kong. That experience was very impactful as I was exposed to a vastly different language and culture than I had experienced before. I began college in 1997 where I majored in Psychology and Chinese reflecting my interest in how our mind works. I was a research assistant for 5 semesters under Dr. Maura Pilotti and completed a senior thesis under the direction of Dr. Leonard Green on delay discounting comparing American, Chinese, and Japanese participants. This was my first true cross-cultural study and involved translating all English materials into Chinese and Japanese for data collection in China and Japan. These experiences solidified my appreciation of rigorous scientific inquiry into how our mind works.
I began my doctoral program at the University of California, Berkeley in 2001. I first worked with Dr. Dan Slobin, and my master's thesis investigated how Chinese-English bilingual children reason about contradictions in each of their languages. Following, I worked under Dr. Carla Hudson Kam, who oversaw my dissertation research. For my dissertation, I compared how 1st and 2nd grade children who spoke African American English (AAE) or Standard American English (SAE) interpreted SAE tense morphology. Eye-tracking measures revealed while the SAE-speaking children rapidly integrated tense morphology during language processing, the AAE-speaking children did not show sensitivity to these morphemes.
After earning my Ph.D., I joined the Center for Research in Language, at UCSD, in 2006 as a post-doctoral researcher. I mainly worked under Dr. Marta Kutas and learned how to use event-related potentials (ERPs) as a fine-grained measure to assess how we make sense of what we hear in real time.
In 2008, I joined the Psychology Department and the University of Puget Sound, and the courses I teach reflect both my cross-disciplinary training as well as my keen interest in how language, thought, and culture interact in our daily lives. I am also active in the community, and teach with Freedom Education Project Puget Sound (FEPPS) and am a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) in Pierce County.
I was born in Germany and my parents and I emigrated to the United States when I was almost 10. At that time, I only spoke German, and I was put into a pull-out ESL class to learn English. This resulted in me becoming bilingual and bicultural, two identities which have shaped my professional life.
When I was 17, I became an exchange student and spent a year living in Hong Kong. That experience was very impactful as I was exposed to a vastly different language and culture than I had experienced before. I began college in 1997 where I majored in Psychology and Chinese reflecting my interest in how our mind works. I was a research assistant for 5 semesters under Dr. Maura Pilotti and completed a senior thesis under the direction of Dr. Leonard Green on delay discounting comparing American, Chinese, and Japanese participants. This was my first true cross-cultural study and involved translating all English materials into Chinese and Japanese for data collection in China and Japan. These experiences solidified my appreciation of rigorous scientific inquiry into how our mind works.
I began my doctoral program at the University of California, Berkeley in 2001. I first worked with Dr. Dan Slobin, and my master's thesis investigated how Chinese-English bilingual children reason about contradictions in each of their languages. Following, I worked under Dr. Carla Hudson Kam, who oversaw my dissertation research. For my dissertation, I compared how 1st and 2nd grade children who spoke African American English (AAE) or Standard American English (SAE) interpreted SAE tense morphology. Eye-tracking measures revealed while the SAE-speaking children rapidly integrated tense morphology during language processing, the AAE-speaking children did not show sensitivity to these morphemes.
After earning my Ph.D., I joined the Center for Research in Language, at UCSD, in 2006 as a post-doctoral researcher. I mainly worked under Dr. Marta Kutas and learned how to use event-related potentials (ERPs) as a fine-grained measure to assess how we make sense of what we hear in real time.
In 2008, I joined the Psychology Department and the University of Puget Sound, and the courses I teach reflect both my cross-disciplinary training as well as my keen interest in how language, thought, and culture interact in our daily lives. I am also active in the community, and teach with Freedom Education Project Puget Sound (FEPPS) and am a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) in Pierce County.