I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA.
I'm a psycholinguist, interested in the processing and representation of linguistic meaning as a component of human cognition, with special reference to explaining variation across individuals, tasks, and languages. To this last point, I work with speakers of Santiago Laxopa Zapotec on a variety of collaborative projects.
I received my Ph.D. in Linguistics from UC Santa Cruz in 2023, co-advised by Pranav Anand and Amanda Rysling. My dissertation was on the timing and consequences of decision-making about various types of uncertain meaning (homonomy, polysemy, distributivity, implicit causal inferences, and scalar implicature) in incremental processing. You can read it here. Following that, I worked with Vera Demberg at Saarland University as part of the ERC grant "Individualized Interaction in Discourse," focusing on developing computational models of cognition which can capture individual differences in real-time pragmatic processing.
Contact: duff@ucla.edu
Office: 2210B Campbell Hall