Sarah Phillips is a linguistics Ph.D. student at New York University. She’s an expert on code-switching — alternating languages or language varieties in a single conversation — and bilingual language processing and development.

Phillips grew up speaking African American English and Korean with her family. This informed her interest in code-switching in early bilingual development. She uses behavioral measures and neuroimaging techniques to examine code-switching as a means for understanding how brains process language. For example, by tracking a bilingual test subject’s eye movements, she can measure how much the brain exerts itself when processing quick changes between languages.

Before attending NYU, she received bachelor’s degrees in linguistics and international affairs from the University of Georgia, followed by a master’s degree in linguistics from California State University, Northridge. She is a member of and has presented research to the Linguistic Society of America and the Society for the Neurobiology of Language.

Courtesy of Sarah Phillips

Pronouns: She/her

Expertise: Code-switching, bilingualism, neurolinguistics, language processing

Location: New York, N.Y., and Savannah, Ga.

Email: Sarah.Phillips@nyu.edu 

Phone: (646) 600-9295

Twitter: @SarahLinguist

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