She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She also received training as a postdoctoral research associate in Cognitive Psychology in the Psychology Department at CU Boulder. Her research follows discourse-functional studies of language, including grammar and syntax in discourse, conversational analyses, language development, and psycholinguistics. Her current research includes relative clauses and prosody in conversations of American English and Mandarin Chinese, and psycholinguistics in reading development.