About me

I am currently an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago, working under the guidance of Professor Diane Brentari. My research focuses on Zinacantec Family Homesign (“Z sign”), a signed language developed by three deaf siblings and their hearing extended family members in Zinacantán, a Tsotsil Maya community of highland Chiapas, Mexico. I am broadly interested in (i) the relationship between community structure and language structure, i.e. how the social dynamics of signing communities influence the grammatical structure of signed languages; and (ii) how variation in the learning environment (e.g., how many language models are available to a learner) influences an individual’s language development. My postdoctoral project focuses on the morphophonological and morphosyntactic structure of Z sign in comparison to other sign languages, homesign systems, and gestures of non-signing individuals.

I received my PhD from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. Before that, I studied Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. Please click here to see my CV (updated August 2024), and feel free to get in touch with me at ag68349 (at) utexas (dot) edu. Some of my publications and presentations are available on my ResearchGate page. If you would like to access anything I haven’t posted, please shoot me an email.