Kathryn Davidson is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Harvard University.  Her research investigates the unique capacity that we have to understand an infinite number of sentences that we've never heard before (semantics), how we incorporate contextual information into these meanings (pragmatics), and how we ever learn to do this (development). Kate is especially interested in what we can learn about linguistic meaning from visual language, both in full natural languages like American Sign Language and in co-speech gestures to spoken languages like English. Her background is in math and theoretical linguistics, and in her research she makes balanced use of theory for hypothesis creation with psycholinguistic experimental methods for gathering and analyzing data.

Kate received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, San Diego, and her B.A. in Mathematics and Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining Harvard, she was a Postdoctoral Associate in Cognitive Science at Yale University, and before that a Postdoctoral Fellow in Linguistics at the University of Connecticut.