I am doing a joint Ph.D. in Computer and Cognitive Science at Indiana University and my advisors are Prof. Michael Gasser. and Prof. Lisa Gershkoff-Stowe. My main interest is first language acquisition and my work centers around emergence of semantic roles AGENT and PATIENT in simple transitive actions. I have collected data on English speaking pre-school children through Baby Language Lab at IU suggesting that knowledge of AGENT and PATIENT is initially local and fragile and grows gradually as a result of experience with the world and exposure to language. I am also working on a cognitive model that learns how to map semantic roles across events without any explicit hard-wired knowledge about roles or verb argument structure. Here you can find more information on the kind of experiments I have been working on.

    I received my Bachelor's degree from ECE Department, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, in 1996, in computer engineering. Prior to coming to IU, I lived in Iran and was a researcher at the School of Cognitive Science , Institute for studies in theoretical Physics and Mathematics (IPM).