Jessica Kotfila

Jessica Kotfila is an Adjunct Professor in the Linguistics Department at Georgetown University and Director of the Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Science. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics and Cognitive Science from Georgetown University (mentored by Elissa Newport), an M.S. in Linguistics from Georgetown, and a B.A. in Psychology and Linguistics from Smith College (mentored by Jill and Peter de Villiers).

Her research focuses on language acquisition and learning mechanisms, particularly the interplay between linguistic structure and learnability. Key interests include how input constraints shape learners' generalizations, the role of abstract syntactic representations in grammar acquisition, and the impact of natural language properties on learning efficiency. Her work investigates movement principles in syntax, distributional cues in input, and the cognitive mechanisms underlying sentence structure acquisition.

Her publications explore recursion in child language, syntactic parsing, and the role of epistemic/deontic modality in grammatical development. Current projects aim to elucidate how learners extrapolate grammatical principles from variable input and the nature of abstract syntactic representations.