Graduate Student, Psychology
Teaching Assistant
College of Liberal Arts
Catharine Echols
About
I am a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin. Before joining the Ph.D. program at UT-Austin, I studied at Faculdade de Letras at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Brazil). I received a B.A. in English and Linguistics in 2005. Following that, I joined the M.A. Program in Developmental Psychology at the same university, earning my M.A. in 2007.
My main research interest is in children's developing cognitive abilities. More specifically, I'm interested in children's language acquisition. I focus primarily on the acquisition of morphological and syntactic aspects. The linguistic theoretical frameworks I mostly adopt are Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar. In cognitive psychology I am mostly sympathetic with the Embodied Cognition approach.
My second research focus is on the growing field known as Cognitive Science of Religion. The field is mainly seeking for cognitively-oriented explanations for an array of religious and other supernatural phenomena. More specifically, I am interested in investigating the way people reason about rituals, that is, actions that do not display an intuitive and transparent causal mechanism. Ultimately, I want to understand more about how human's cognitive system supports the way we often deal with religion and supernatural beliefs in general.
My third academic interest is more of a methodological nature. I'm particularly interested in statistical modeling in linguistics that uses the language R (The R Core Development Team) as its main tool.
Scientific blog: http://www.cognando.com
Contact Information
The University of Texas at Austin
Department of Psychology
1 University Station A8000
Austin, TX - 78712
USA
(432) 235-0005
