Tory earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics with a specialization in Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego. Her dissertation research, funded by the San Diego Fellowship and the NSF GRFP, examined the grammaticalization of the American Sign Language (ASL) sign SELF. Drawing on diachronic sources—including historical films and dictionary entries of ASL and its predecessor, French Sign Language (LSF), dating from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries—she traced SELF from its deictic origins through the copular cycle, shifting from a pronominal function to a copular function in contemporary ASL, as evidenced in a modern corpus of YouTube videos. To further confirm the copular use of SELF, she conducted experimental studies using Likert scale tasks. More broadly, Tory is interested in how signs and the structures of languages with iconic substrates evolve toward greater arbitrariness, progressively disentangling the signer from the message. Currently, at Harvard University and Boston University, she is investigating the widespread phenomenon of movement repetition in ASL and other sign languages, with particular attention to its role in noun–verb pairs. Her additional research interests include language acquisition and reading in deaf learners.