About Me
I am a researcher at Tel Aviv University, at Dorit Ravid's developmental psycholinguistics lab. I serve as the Assistant Editor of Writtern Language and Literacy, and I am also an adjunct teacher at the Deprtment of Communication Disorders, Tel Aviv University, at the Department of Hebrew Language, Bar-Ilan University, and at the Faculty of Education, Bar-Ilan University.
I work within a Usage-Based and Quantitative Linguistics approaches to language.
My research focuses on a functional-discursive perspective on syntactic phenomena, corpus building, and the application of advanced statistical methodologies to corpus analysis of syntax in both children and adults.
The key question I address in my research concerns the nature of syntactic and morphological knowledge,
taking into account recent findings which show that (i) linguistic learning
is a discriminative process in which frequency is only part of the story, (ii) grammar cannot be abstract,
and (iii) linguistic phenomena can, and should be explained on the basis
of processes of implicit statistical learning guided by communicative needs. I model the way morphological and syntactic structures
are learned, produced and understood by adopting a non-abstractionist approach, considering the dynamic aspects
of usage, communicative needs, and cognitive representation. By accounting for
Discourse Profile Constructions in an exemplar-based model, and for dynamic networks as representing morphological systems structure, my research aims at a better understanding of the multivariate nature of the knowledge possessed by
the language-user.
Check out my publications, the courses I am teaching, and a search app for frequency counting in an original corpus complied from the Knesset's committees.