I am interested in the way that comprehenders uncover structure from their linguistic input - the way that they infer relationships between words within a sentence and also between sentences in a discourse. My research focuses on the interaction between these two types of inferencing, testing how the pragmatic relationships that comprehenders infer to hold between sentences can influence the relationships that they infer to hold within a sentence.

As has been demonstrated in other areas of human cognition, the ability to recognize and process certain relationships depends in part on expectation generation. Existing work has found evidence that comprehenders make predictions about upcoming sounds, words, and phrases; I am interested in expectation generation over pragmatic outcomes - what cues do comprehenders use to make predictions about where a discourse is going, what relationships do they infer to hold between one sentence and the next, and how do these predictions and inferences interact with processing at other levels of linguistic structure?