About

My name is Maria Goldshtein.

I am a psycholinguist/cognitive scientist, specifically interested in  – depth of processing, meaning-making heuristics, and the various factors that inform them. I am interested in examining how we interpret the language we are daily exposed to. I am also interested in optimizing our ability to interpret quantitative data we gather, using supplementary qualitative methodologies, and common sense.

I got my PhD at the Linguistics department at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.  Where I worked on individual differences in the processing and interpretation of comparative illusion sentences (more people have been to Russia than I have) and underinformative scalar implicatures (some cats are mammals), using offline (judgment tasks, and data of a more qualitative nature) and online (EEG) methodologies. 

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, Where I work on inclusive language analytics, as they pertain to NLP algorithms for essay assessment and rating.

Other than language, my main interests include literature, music and photography.