Current Research
In everyday conversation, our inner lives leak out in all manner of cues—written on our faces, brimming in our silences, and hinted by what we leave unsaid. In my research, I am primarily interested in how children draw rich mental inferences from subtle conversational cues. While even infants seem to readily recruit mental representations in the service of conversation, my work asks how conversational cues enable children to build and update those representations in the first place. Below, you will find a selection of some of my current research.
Delays and disfluencies (“um”) are ubiquitous in everyday conversation and often signal rich information about what’s going on inside a speaker’s mind. How—and how quickly—something is said can be as meaningful as what is said. In this line of work, I investigate how children (and adults) use disfluencies to infer a speaker’s underlying mental processes. My research explores how children use these cues to reason about just how much someone knows and what their true underlying feelings are. In this work, I argue that children’s reasoning about delays and disfluencies is inferential (vs. heuristic), broad (vs. limited), and flexible (vs. fixed). 
Imagine a young boy expressing a gender counter-stereotypical preference (e.g., wanting to buy a Barbie doll) and his caregiver provides a permissive, gender egalitarian response. However, imagine that response comes slowly, with markers of surprise and production difficulty (e.g., “Oh! Um. . . Sure”). What message does that young boy really receive?
While people may be reluctant to explicitly state social stereotypes, their underlying beliefs nevertheless emerge through subtler conversational cues, such as surprisal reactions that reveal expectations. In this line of work, I investigate how messages that are explicitly permissive and outwardly egalitarian (e.g., “Sure, you can have that one”) might nevertheless be interpreted very differently based on presence of surprisal cues like interjections (“oh!”) and disfluencies (“um”). This work provides emerging evidence that conversational feedback may play a critical and underappreciated role in the transmission of social beliefs ( Morris & Shaw, 2024).
