I'm a visiting professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Alberta. I am also affiliated with the U of A's excellent Centre for Comparative Psycholinguistics. My research examines language as a both cognitive and a social phenomenon. In this work, I focus on the lexicon (aka words) because it is an excellent link between context and cognition. To get a broad picture of social and cognitive factors at play in language, I use a variety of research methods, including corpus studies, computational modeling, online surveys, and a number of experimental methods.
My dissertation, completed at the University of Minnesota, looks at the social and cognitive factors underlying the diffusion of new words throughout speech communities.
My CV has more info about all this, including recent publications+presentations.
In my blog, I discuss language, linguistic research, and other things that are important to me.