Chrissy received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Duke University in 2004, conducting her dissertation research in the Swaablab at UC Davis. Her work examined how word-level associative priming interacts with discourse-level congruence during sentence comprehension. Using ERPs and eye-tracking across several experiments, she showed that global discourse context rapidly influences lexical-semantic processing whereas associative priming effects were attenuated in coherent discourse. She also examined how linguistic prominence modulates coreference resolution with repeated names and pronouns, using event-related potentials (ERPs) to track the time course of referential processing. She demonstrated that establishing coreference with a repeated name can disrupt basic repetition priming—particularly when the antecedent is prominent in the discourse model—suggesting that discourse-level representations can override lower-level lexical activation.  These findings highlight the dominance of discourse-level representations in shaping real-time comprehension In addition, she contributed to an fMRI study demonstrating that effects of word concreteness could be anatomically and functionally dissociated from effects of semantic priming in inferior frontal regions—findings that align with perceptually grounded models of conceptual representation.