Empathy has a habit of showing up in two places at once. There is the version everyone knows — the social-psychological one, the standing-in-someone-else's-shoes version, the kind that makes for good commencement speeches. And then there is a quieter version, hiding in plain sight inside grammar itself: the way a sentence quietly commits to a perspective before its speaker has decided to take one. My research pursues how intertwined these distinct notions of empathy are.
My early research involved discourse and conversational analysis of language therapy for children with developmental delays, comparing a vocabulary-first approach to one organized around emotional engagement. When the therapy started from where the child already was — their attention, their affect, their gaze — language arrived in layered modalities memorized vocabulary never could reach: gesture, intonation, timing, play. It looked less like instruction and more like joining and co-creating a conversation already in progress.
If empathy is structuring how we use language, the structure should leave a trace, and traces are measurable. Psycholinguistic experiments and EEG data say it does and they are. Listeners flag violations of empathic encoding within milliseconds, fast enough that no deliberation is involved, and the size of that neural reaction tracks how empathic the same person is on social-psychological measures. Linguistic Empathy and Psychological Empathy turn out to be unusually well-behaved as a pair: they correlate where you would hope, and they predict each other in directions that are theoretically interesting rather than trivial.
Empathy is not a soft skill bolted onto a hard system; it is part of how the system runs. The processes we usually treat as separate problems are variations on the same underlying move: how a child acquires a first language, how an adult learns a second, how a therapist meets a client, how a teacher reaches a student who feels unmet. They are all attempts to take a perspective seriously enough to let it shape what comes next.
This conviction runs through years of tutoring children with learning differences, through sociolinguistics courses where students bring their own communities in as primary material, through establishing natural language interactive education in São Paulo for professors across departments. The research and the practice are the same argument in two registers. Both insist that language is built between people, and that taking the other person's perspective is not a nicety on top of communication but fundamental to the means of communication itself.
Email is best — I'm friendly and reasonably prompt. Open to speaking, workshops, guest lectures, collaborations on writing at the language ↔ energy intersection, and the occasional crossword constructor swap.