I'm a psychologist and a cognitive linguist interested in the connection between spatial language and spatial thought. My work looks at the understanding of motion language, including actual motion (e.g., The track team runs along the creek) and fictive motion (e.g., The road runs along the creek). I'm especially interested in why motion verbs are used to describe static scenes or non-physical domains (e.g., time), how they are used in natural discourse, and what types of physical actions accompany them.
In 2001, I completed my PhD in Psychology at University of California, Santa Cruz, where I worked with Raymond Gibbs, Jr, author of Poetics of Mind. My dissertation investigated how people comprehend sentences such as The highway runs along the coast and The mountain range goes from the desert to the ocean, sentences that feature motion verbs but describe static spatial scenes. The results of that work and some of my other work suggest that dynamic construal (e.g., simulating motion along a path) is part of language understanding, including figurative languaqe understanding.
Before doing graduate work in cognitive psychology, I taught English as a second language and English for special purposes at University of California, San Diego. While there, I designed, and coordinated a language program for international scholars whose first language was not English. Before that, I was a graduate student in the UCSD Linguistics Department, where I did research on semantics (e.g., epistemic modality, verbs of perception, evidentiality).
I'm originally from Mariposa, located near Yosemite National Park. My family history is deeply rooted in that part of California. My American Indian ancestors were Southern Sierra Miwok (Merced River Canyon, northeast of Mariposa) and Chukchansi Yokuts (Nelder Grove, Oakhurst area). In the 1800's, my other ancestors came from places such as France, Portugal, Wales, Scotland, Sweden, and the Southern US, and they worked as miners, lumberjacks, and ranchers.
What else? My husband
Paul
Maglio is from New York City. He's a research scientist and
manager of the
Human Sciences Group at
at Almaden IBM Research in South San Jose.
He's published in HCI (human-computer interaction) and occasionally
still does cognitive work on epistemic actions
(roughly, physical actions
people do to make computation easier).
His PhD is in Cognitive Science from University of California, San Diego.