Zara Harmon

PhD

Post-doctoral Associate, Department of Linguistics

University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies

Zara Harmon is a Post-doctoral Associate at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) and the Department of Linguistics. She received her PhD in linguistics from the University of Oregon in 2019 and joined the University of Maryland the same year. Her research explores how speakers extend familiar forms to novel contexts, and factors that influence the ease or difficulty of this process. More specifically, she studies how contextual cues and top-down cues influence generalization and productivity, and how these cues interact during learning. Currently, she is using probabilistic models to investigate problems with productivity of grammatical morphemes in the speech of children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD).