About Me

Laura Kertz I teach courses in linguistics and language processing and direct the Sentence and Discourse Processing Lab at Brown Universtity.

I conduct research in linguistics, with a focus on argument structure (especially of adjectives), information structure, and discourse. I also do experimental work testing the hypotheses generated by my linguistic research. I work primarily on English, as spoken by typical adults, but am also a collaborator on a project documenting Moro, a language spoken in Sudan. I joined Brown in 2010 after leaving the University of California, San Diego, where I receieved a PhD in Linguistics and was a pre-doctoral training fellow at the Center for Research in Language.

Linguistics at Brown

Linguistics at Brown covers four core areas (phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics). Faculty research areas include computational phonology (Uriel Cohen Priva), the syntax-semantics interface (Pauline Jacobson) and the syntax-pragmatics interface (Laura Kertz). Visiting professor Geoff Pullum's work encompasses both the grammar of English and issues in the philosophy of Linguistics. Given our position within the larger CLPS department, our BA and PhD programs offer a unique environment for training in linguistics, placing special emphasis on empirical methodology while maintaining a critical engagement with linguistic theory. Read more about our undergraduate curriculum and our graduate program.

Language Processing at Brown

Students pursuing a psycholinguistics focus within our undergraduate and graduate Cognitive Science programs complete coursework in language processing and child language acquisition and may choose to take additional courses in formal linguistics, philisophy of language, and neurolinguistics. Graduate students and exceptional undergraduates enjoy the opportunity to pursue original research in one of our three language processing labs: Sheila Blumstein's Speech and Psycholinguistics Lab, Jim Morgan's Metcalf Infant Research Lab, and my own Sentence and Discourse Processing Lab. Students interested in the cognitive neuroscience of language can also take advantage of courses in neuroscience and neurolinguistics, as well as our departmental relationship with the Brown Institute for Brain Science