Zara Harmon
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) Language Development Department. I am particularly interested in how prediction, planning, and overgeneralization errors during development help children build representations that organize sequences of words. These representations support the learning of highly familiar sequences as well as the ability to deal with novel contexts, suggesting that both experience and powerful learning mechanisms contribute to their development. I use corpus studies, computational modeling, and experiments to better understand how these representations are developed. I received my PhD in Linguistics from the University of Oregon in 2019. My dissertation examines how high accessibility of linguistic forms in language production leads to the extension of these forms to novel contexts, providing an explanation for semantic (over-)extension of high-frequency forms in language acquisition and language use. Prior to MPI, I was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) and a postdoc affiliate at the Department of Linguistics and the program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science. Following UMD, I joined the University of Iowa Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, conducting eye-tracking experiments as part of on-going collaborations.