Welcome! 어서오세요! Akwaaba!

I am an Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Cognitive Science, and Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) at the University of Arizona. Prior to joining the UA, I completed my PhD in the Linguistics Department at New York University, working under Liina Pylkkänen‘s advisement, and my postdoctoral fellowship in the Neurology Department at Georgetown University, working with Anna Greenwald, Elissa Newport and Peter Turkeltaub.

All of us are capable of building and interpreting novel linguistic expressions despite the wide range of variability in our language experiences. As children, we implicitly learn the “words” and “rules” of our languages; and as adults, we rapidly comprehend and produce both familiar and novel sentences. What are the principled mechanisms, and their neural bases, that support our ability to de-/compose linguistic expressions? I am interested in characterizing both language-specific (morpho-/syntactic processing) and domain-general (attention, working memory) mechanisms as well as how they interact during both learning and processing. To do this work, I focus on bilingual populations because they reflect the linguistic and social diversity that represents the global majority. I use behavioral measures (eye-tracking, response times, accuracy), neuroimaging techniques (MEG, MRI), and artificial language learning paradigms to develop and refine a linguistically-inclusive, neurobiologically-grounded model of language that can readily translate into clinical spaces.

Being Blasian (Black + Korean-American) also means that I did not see people who look or sound like me in academic spaces very often. Because of this, I am committed to putting linguistics and the neurobiology of language into public spaces. Most of this outreach has been with at-risk youth in the New York City area, talking about the functions and benefits of code-switching as well as the neurobiology of language. I have also appeared on several podcasts, including NPR’s Short Wave, and most recently assisted in the filming of the third documentary in the Talking Black in America Project series.

Read my Op-Ed for JoySauce on the costs of assimilation here.

Read my Q&A with Scientific American here.

I am also passionate about photography! You can see my general body of work here or of linguists here.