Zara Harmon

I am a Senior Investigator at the MPI Language Development Department. I joined the MPI as a Postdoctoral Researcher in October 2023. My research focuses on the development of hierarchical representations and complex planning in language. I am particularly interested in how prediction, planning, and overgeneralization errors during development help children build representations that organize sequences of words. These representations support the learning of highly familiar sequences as well as the ability to deal with novel contexts. This suggests that both experience and powerful learning mechanisms contribute to their development. I use corpus studies, experiments, and computational modeling to better understand how they are formed and refined over time. 

I received my PhD in Linguistics from the University of Oregon in 2019. My dissertation examines how accessibility of linguistic forms in language production leads to the extension of those forms to novel contexts, a mechanism that accounts for over-extension errors during language acquisition and creative uses of high frequency forms during language change. Prior to MPI, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).