I hold an MA in psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. My doctoral research was focused on first language acquisition — how children learn the building blocks of language, from their first words to complex grammar.
Over the course of my academic career, I published 19 research papers on language acquisition and development, including peer-reviewed articles in international journals such as Scando-Slavica, Estonian Papers in Applied Linguistics, and the Mouton de Gruyter series. My work has explored how children acquire verb morphology, how adults and children use language together, and how we can measure linguistic development using corpus data and computational methods.
I also conducted fieldwork documenting minority languages — Bashkir and Chuvash — an experience that deepened my understanding of what it means to learn, use, and protect a language that exists alongside a dominant one.
In 2019, I moved to Ireland — to the Kerry Gaeltacht — and began learning Irish. Nead Teanga grows out of that intersection — the science of how languages are learned and the deeply personal experience with Irish.