- When did you graduate? December 2009
- What do you do now? I’m a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Paris Descartes where I work in the Speech Team with Dr. Thierry Nazzi. In general, I am fascinated by the ability with which infants and young children are able to soak up language. Specifically, I’m looking at how infants use consonants and vowels to recognize and learn words. Actually, consonants are quite a bit more informative for this than vowels are. I’m especially interested in how these abilities at young ages relate to general language development later on. Of course, I can’t just ask the babies that visit the lab to answer my questions, so I use different kinds of behavioral methods as well as ERP (event-related potentials from continuous EEG) to ask these questions.
- Why did you major in psychology? At one point, someone told me that I was a good listener and that talking to me was helpful for working through problems. My aunt and uncle both studied at UWGB, in Social Work and Human Development, respectively. Also, I thoroughly enjoyed my high school Psychology class. I always liked school, but my Psychology class was really interesting. After taking Introduction to Psychology with Dr. Lorenz, there was no turning back.
- What do you do for fun? Since I moved to Paris I’ve taken up sewing and quilt making. There is nothing more relaxing than sitting in front of my sewing machine and working on a project while I listen to the latest podcast. I also have a road bike that I love to ride, but getting out in the city is often difficult. I also like to hike and there are really nice forests and trails around Paris. I’m in Germany about once a month to visit my boyfriend, and we always make an effort to get outside into the forest for a walk.
- What academic experience or accomplishment are you most proud of? I used a novel statistical method in my first publication and as a result it has been decently cited. For me, though, the content of that paper is more meaningful. I found that when bilingual preschoolers hear a word in one language, they activate the translation for that word in their other language. About a year after I published that, I was listening to the keynote presentation from one of the most influential researchers in bilingual language development. In her talk, she cited this study of mine. That felt pretty awesome!
- What’s your favorite movie, book, and TV show, related to psychology? I would say its a tie between the movie “Awakenings”, and the book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat”. Both are accounts of the experiences of Dr. Oliver Sacks, who was a fascinating man.
- What an important goal or accomplishment you are currently working on? I’m currently trying to teach myself (with considerable guidance from others) how to use Fieldtrip, which is a toolbox for MATLAB. I’m interested in using this toolbox to analyze my ERP data. This kind of data can be very complex, and the toolbox Fieldtrip offers some very powerful statistical functions to handle the analysis I want to do.
- What else do you want people to know about you? I speak fairly fluent German and I’m currently working on picking up Schwäbisch (Swabian), which is a dialect spoken in southwest Germany, where my boyfriend is from. My French is good enough for me to get by at the office and test children who visit the lab. My experience learning languages has been great inspiration for my research as well. It’s really hard! But, little babies learn language with incredible ease. I usually say that my motivation to do my research comes from jealousy!