Kathryn Davidson

Kathryn Davidson

Assistant Professor of Linguistics
Kathryn Davidson
I'm an assistant professor in Linguistics at Harvard University where my research investigates the unique capacity that we have to understand an infinite number of sentences that we've never heard before (semantics), how we incorporate contextual information into these meanings (pragmatics), and how we ever learn to do this (development). I'm especially interested in what we can learn about linguistic meaning from visual language, both in full natural languages like American Sign Language and in co-speech gestures to spoken languages like English. My background is in math and theoretical linguistics, and in my research I make balanced use of theory for hypothesis creation with psycholinguistic experimental methods for gathering and analyzing data.