About

Emily graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2019 with a BA in English and a BA in Linguistics with a minor in American Sign Language. She then moved to San Diego, California, where she completed her PhD in the San Diego State/ UC San Diego Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communicative Disorders. During graduate school, she investigated the cognitive processes of reading for deaf adults through eye-tracking and electroencephalography. Notable findings include evidence that deaf readers co-activate ASL phonological information during sentence reading and have a stronger relationship between reading comprehension and morphological awareness than skill-matched hearing readers. As a postdoctoral researcher at Boston University, she is currently studying joint attention between deaf children and their signing caregivers during book reading. Emily is interested in the dynamics of visual attention for signing children and how it pertains to linguistic and literacy development, with the goal of improving language outcomes for deaf children during school and beyond. Outside of the lab, you can find her hiking, listening to true crime podcasts, or hanging out with her cat Summer.