Recent Projects
Scope ambiguity parsing among Mandarin-English bilinguals.
LeeAnn Stover
My QP2 study examines how the bilingual experience of Heritage Speakers (HSs) impacts the computation of doubly-quantified constructions in English such as ‘Every shark is attacking a pirate’, which have two possible readings in English but are argued to be unambiguously scope-rigid in Mandarin Chinese. I probe whether HSs pattern more in line with the well-documented Processing Scope Economy (PSE) or an emergent Avoidance of Ambiguity (AA) strategy. Forty-three highly proficient bilingual participants completed an online experiment using PC Ibex software. They listened to an aural stimulus, selected which of two pictures best matches the sentence they heard, and then rated the picture they selected for appropriateness. Results show mixed support for the PSE and AA, suggesting that HSs can compute inverse scope in line with the PSE but may also prefer to avoid it in line with the AA strategy when a surface scope interpretation is available.
Multilingual Sentence Processing.
Daniela Castillo
My dissertation project focuses on code-switching, a multilingual’s ability to fluidly alternate between languages within a sentence. Specifically, I investigate the role that morpho-phonology plays in modulating the processing costs associated with Spanish-to-English code-switches in progressive versus perfect constructions, such as those illustrated in 1) and 2) below.
1) Los niños están playing with toys.
the children are
2) Los niños han played with toys.
the children have
I am also currently collaborating on two separate projects that explore different aspects of heritage speakers’ grammars. These projects focus on Spanish heritage speakers’ lexical and syntactic complexity and on the role that relative language use plays in the processing of the first learned language.
Acquisition and Predictive Processing of Structural, Lexical, and Inherent Cases in Russian L2 Learners.
Reid Vancelette
Reid’s dissertation investigates 2 aspects of the acquisition of case in Intermediate and Advanced second language learners of Russian. In his first experiment, he uses a self-paced listening grammaticality judgment task on sentences with nominals that are either correctly or incorrectly marked in various structural, inherent, and lexical cases. In his second experiment, he uses eye-tracking in the visual word paradigm alongside a sentence picture matching task with sentences correctly marked in the same cases used in Experiment 1 to see if L2 learners of different proficiency levels can use case as a cue for predictive processing. Ultimately, one of the goals of his dissertation is assess whether there is a connection between the level of case acquisition and the ability to use that case to predict upcoming linguistic information in Russian, a language with a very rich morphological case system.
Bidirectional influence of L1-L2 on the interpretation of Thai and English reflexives.
Naparat Meechanyakul
The objective of my project is to investigate how Thai-English bilingual speakers process and interpret referents for Thai and English reflexives through the use of visual world eye tracking paradigm. As a part of this project, I recently completed a study where I employed a binary forced- choice judgment task to examine the binding preference for Thai reflexives by Thai native speakers. I found that the interpretation of Thai reflexives is primarily driven by pragmatics, as opposed to English where the reflexives are considered primarily driven by syntactic constraint. The next step is to examine how the pragmatic and syntactic knowledge interacts and influence the interpretation of Thai and English reflexives in the mind of Thai-English late bilingual speakers.
In addition to the interaction of L1-L2 grammatical knowledge in Thai L2 speakers of English, I’m also interested in theoretical and experimental syntax of Thai language.