Hi, I’m Zach. Welcome to my website!

I am a cognitive scientist and NSF-SPRF Postdoctoral Fellow at Penn State, where I am a member of the Bilingualism and Linguistic Diversity Lab. I’m interested in how people navigate a world that is filled with language variation. Most of my work focuses on morphosyntactic (grammatical) variation, including differences between African American Language (AAL) and Mainstream (“Standard”) American English.

My work frames variation as a cognitive phenomenon, asking how people represent and process morphosyntactic differences across language varieties (dialects). I have used a variety of methods to address this question, including eye-tracking and various behavioral measures, and in my post doc, I’m using EEG. I have also studied the effects of a sociolinguistically-informed intervention, examining its impact on AAL-speaking children’s reading growth and their teachers’ language ideologies.

I received my Ph.D. in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science from the University of Maryland, where I was advised by Jan Edwards and Jared Novick, and I completed my B.A. and M.A. in Linguistics at Yale, where I was a founding member of the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project.