EDUCATiON

Current	Graduate student, Brain & Cognitive Sciences University of Rochester, Rochester NY Advisor: Richard Aslin
Spring 2007	B.A. in Linguistics, with Honors B.A. in Print Journalism, with Honors University of Southern California, Los Angeles
Spring 2001	High School Diploma, with Honors Metairie Park Country Day School, New Orleans

HONORS & FELLOWSHiPS

Fall 2008 - Spring 2011	NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. National Science Foundation.
Summer 2007	LSA Presidents’ Fellowship. Linguistics Society of America. Summer Institute of Linguistics, Stanford University.
Spring 2007	Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research. Dean Peter Starr, USC College of Letters, Arts, & Sciences. University of Southern California.
Spring 2007	First Place in Social Sciences. USC Undergraduate Research Symposium. University of Southern California.
Fall 2005 - Spring 2007	Provost's Research Fellowship. University of Southern California.

RESEARCH EXPERiENCE

Fall 2007 – Current	Rochester Baby Lab. Graduate student advised by Richard Aslin. Behavioral research on statistical word learning by infants.
Fall 2007 – Current	Human Language Processing (HLP) Lab. Graduate student working with Florian Jaeger. Corpus-based research on redundancy and reduction in speech.
Spring 2005 – Spring 2007	USC Language Development Lab. Research assistant to Toben Mintz and Rachel Walker. Research on infants' sensitivity to vowel harmony and its role in segmentation. Independent research on English-speaking adults' sensitivity to vowel harmony.
Summer 2006 – Spring 2007	USC Speech Production and Articulation kNowledge (SPAN) Group. Researh assistant to Dani Byrd and Shrikanth Narayanan. Research on speech articulations and phonological processes using real-time MRI videos.
Fall 2005 – Spring 2006	USC Phonetics & Phonology Group. Research assistant to Rachel Walker. Research on the articulation of consonants (sibilant harmony) in Kinyarwanda using EMMA magnetometry.

TEACHiNG EXPERiENCE

Spring 2008	Teaching assistant for Language Development (BCS/LING/PSY 259) at the University of Rochester. Course taught by Ben Faber.
Spring 2003 – Summer 2007	Academic & Master SAT tutor for Princeton Review in Irvine, California. Math and writing tutoring sessions for high school students; also SAT and AP exam preparation.
Fall 2006 – Summer 2007	Children's art workshop leader at Orange County Catholic Worker, a shelter providing food and relief for homeless families in Santa Ana, California. Weekly therapeutic art workshops designed to build confidence for children and their parents.
Spring 2006 – Summer 2007	Academic tutor with School on Wheels, a grassroots non-profit providing tutoring and academic support for homeless children in and around Los Angeles. Weekly academic tutoring sessions for K-8 shelter residents.

PRESENTATiONS

July 2008	Frank, A.F., Kidd, C., Post, M., Van Durme, B., & Jaeger, T.F. The Web as a Psycholinguistic Resource. Poster presented at the 5th International Workshop on Language Production, Annapolis, MD.
April 2008	Kidd, C. & Jaeger, T.F. Prosodic Phrasing and Function Word Pronunciation. Talk given at Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
March 2008	Jaeger, T.F. & Kidd, C. Toward a unified model of redundancy avoidance and strategic lengthening. Poster presented at the 21st annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Chapel Hill, NC.
April 2007	DeFreitas, C. & Welday, A. Baby Linguistics: Infants Attend to Complex Vowel Patterns to Understand Speech. Faculty sponsors: Toben Mintz & Rachel Walker. Poster presented at the 9th annual Undergraduate Symposium for Scholarly and Creative Works, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.
December 2006	Walker, R., Byrd, D., Mpiranya, F., Lee, S., & DeFreitas, C. The articulation of consonants in Kinyarwanda's sibilant harmony. Poster presented at the 4th joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the Acoustical Society of Japan, Honolulu, HI.
April 2006	DeFreitas, C. & Ronge, B. Silent Speech Gestures in Kinyarwanda. Faculty sponsor: Rachel Walker. Poster presented at the 8th annual Undergraduate Symposium for Scholarly and Creative Works, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.
April 2005	Casey, L., DeFreitas, C. & Lawyer, L. Piecing it Apart: Infants Using Vowel Harmony as a Tool for Sentence Parsing. Faculty sponsors: Toben Mintz & Rachel Walker. Poster presented at the 7th annual Undergraduate Symposium for Scholarly and Creative Works, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.