Hi I’m Katherine!
I am a linguist and a computer scientist. Currently, I am a PhD Candidate in Linguistics at the University of Maryland where I’m advised by Dr. Jeff Lidz and Dr. Colin Phillips.
My research aims to address the questions (1) why do humans treat superficially dissimilar phenomena as structurally alike? (2) why do the same patterns of generalization occur across diverse languages? (3) how do children become adult speakers of their language as a function of their experience in the world? I approach these question using a broad range of methods including computational modeling and behavioral studies with children and adults.
My recent projects focus on filler gap dependencies and the properties that cluster across constructions. I have a number of ongoing projects including cross construction island effects, knowledge of strong crossover (in 4 year olds and in large lanaguage models), the usefulness of large language models in understanding island effects and, reconstruction in across the board and parasitic gap constructions.
I have also looked at 19-month-old’s knowledge of argument vs. adjunct questions and 4 and 5 year old children’s abilities with epistemic and non-epistemic reasoning.
At Maryland, I’m part of an exciting linguistics cohort: Joselyn Rodriguez, Jingyi Chen, London Dixon , Fëdor Golosov.
Before coming to Maryland, I was an adjunct lecturer in the Computer Science department at Hunter College, where I was also the Lab Manager for the Computational Language Acquisition Group (COLAG) under the direction of Dr. William Sakas. I completed my B.A. in Psychology and Linguistics at Columbia University and my M.A. in Linguistics at the CUNY Graduate Center with a focus on learnability and syntactic acquisition.
You can contact me at kghowitt (at) umd (dot) edu