I recently finished a joint Ph.D. in Computer and Cognitive Science at Indiana University under the supervision of Prof. Michael Gasser. and Prof. Lisa Gershkoff-Stowe. Currently I am a Post Doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistic, in Nijmegen, Netherlands.

My main interest is first language acquisition and my Ph.D.work was about 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 also implemented a cognitive model that learned how to map objects across events based on the role they play in the action 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).