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Human reasoning and communication relies on a handful of words that encode logical concepts such as and, or, no, if, some, all, the, a... . Each language has a relatively small set of such words and systematically uses them to communicate human ideas and thoughts. My research engages with three foundational questions regarding logical words:

1. Learning: how are logical words learned and how do abstract logical concepts associated with these words emerge in humans and computational models such as LLMs?
2. Understanding and Processing: how are logical words understood and proceessed in the human mind and in computational models such as LLMs?
3. Crosslinguistic Representation: what are the universal and variable patterns in how logical concepts are encoded across different languages?

To address these questions I use a combination of methods including computational modeling, experimental research with human participants, and crosslinguistic formal analysis of linguistic data.