I am a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut, and a Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories. I am an affiliated faculty member of the CT Institute for Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and a former fellow of the UConn Humanities Institute.

My main research interest is to better understand the human language faculty. Primarily I examine this by studying the structure and acquisition of American Sign Language, and by looking at the process of language acquisition across different languages. See my Research page and the Sign Linguistics and Language Acquisition lab site for more information.