A list of my recent papers can be found on my CV (see the link to the left). I'm happy to send any manuscripts of papers to you if you're interested in reading some of my written work. Comments and questions and queries are always welcome and encouraged.

In short, much of my recent work focuses on the second language acquisition of German morphosyntax by native speakers of English. I've been working on a case study of an L1 English speaker who has been living immersed in a German-speaking environment for 7 years, and who, despite this immersion and 5 years of formal instruction in German, shows a marked disjunction between the 'core' syntactic properties of German (i.e., word order, argument structure, etc) and the morphological realization of syntactic agreement. More specifically my subject shows particular deficits in overt DP morphology, while verbal morphology is quite accurate. Data from this case study are being presented at a number of conferences in 2007, including the Northwest Linguistics Conference, EuroSLA, the Second Language Research Forum, and the BU Conference on Language Development. 2008 conferences on this topic include the LSA Summer Meeting and the Second Language Research Forum. In this work I argue that syntactic feature deficits are not responsible for my subject's problems with DP morphology (contrary to accounts such as the Representational Deficit Hypothesis), and moreover, that competence-based accounts of missing surface inflection, while insightful, only provide a partial account of the mechanisms needed to explain morphological errors made during real-time speech. I argue instead that underspecification and missing surface inflection can acurately be accounted for in Levelt's 'Speaking' model.

I have also recently teamed up with the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Lab in the Department of Psychology here at the University of Washington. In this lab we use EEG recordings and the corresponding event-related potentials to measure the on-line processing of words and sentences, and we have recently begun investigating the acquisition of processing routines in second language learners. I have recently completed data collection for an experiment looking at differences in processing noun and verb agreement morphology in L2 German across a range of learner proficiencies. Data from this project will be presented at the 2008 BU Conference on Language Development.

My MA thesis research looked at the acquisition of verb placement in L2 German, and in particular at the difference between lexical and 'light' verbs in the development of verb-second. Here is a copy of the submitted thesis. I hope to expand on this research in the near future and look not only at the distribution of verbs within CP, but also at the development of verb placement within IP.