Assistant Professor
Institute for Language Sciences
Department of Languages, Literature and Communication
Trans 10
3512 JK Utrecht
Netherlands

Email:
Phone: +31 (0)30 253 6042

I am an Assistant Professor working in the Department of Languages, Literature and Communication and the Institute for Language Sciences at Utrecht University. My research focuses on computational models of language acquisition. In particular, I investigate how infants learn the sound categories (consonants and vowels) and sound combinations (phonotactics) of their native language. I use a multifaceted approach which involves analyses of speech addressed to infants, computational modeling of language learning mechanisms, and psycholinguistic experiments with human language learners.

Previously, I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at New York University. I also worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania. My research at Penn was funded by a ‘Rubicon’ research grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Before coming to Penn I briefly worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Information Retrieval at the University of Amsterdam.

I hold a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Utrecht University (2011), and an M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Amsterdam (2005).

Research interests

Computational modeling, infant language development, phonological acquisition, automatic speech recognition, artificial language learning, information retrieval.