My core interests lie in answering two big questions about human language that I’ve now been pursuing for almost 25 years: (i) how did language arise in our species and (ii) what is the (computational and representational) architecture of grammar? Since no other species has language like ours, these questions get to the heart of what makes us human.

Advances in neuroscience, genetics, evo-devo, computer modeling techniques, and studies of learning in a variety of animals have revolutionized our understanding of cognition and the biology that makes it possible. My work synthesizes cutting-edge findings from all of these areas and applies them to the question of what systems and abilities underlie the human language externalization system (phonology and its interfaces). I hypothesize that very little in this domain is unique to humans, though we may be the only species in which all the relevant abilities are found. In light of this view, I have proposed a theory of phonology that makes maximal use of operations and representations that were plausibly present in our species prior to the emergence of externalized language. I believe that long-standing debates concerning the nature of phonological theory, for example the status of ‘unnatural’ patterns and the status of markedness, can be at least partially adjudicated by biological evidence. A biological approach also helps to define components of our language faculty in terms that are domain-general enough yet specific enough that they may be studied by cognitive neuroscientists, among others.

Apart from this, I have accumulated a rather eclectic publication record that spans everything from bioinformatics to applications of atmospheric and marine sciences.