|
We conduct research on the cognitive and neural basis of language acquisition and processing. The underlying question we seek to address is: What makes human language special? More specifically, why are adults able to understand most sentences with ease despite the daunting computational problem posed by language processing?And why are most children able to acquire language with ease despite the seemingly intractable learnability problem posed by language acquisition?
Undergraduates who join the lab will participate in one of the following two projects:
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND PROCESSING (LAP) project. In this project, we investigate how adults and children produce and understand spoken sentences. Our working hypothesis is that the reason adults easily understand most sentences is that they use non-syntactic cues to “predict” the upcoming structure of sentences: in other words, they build the syntactic scaffold and “know” where to put the words of a sentence in the scaffold before they even hear the words. We have discovered that when native-English speaking adults say sentences that are temporarily or permanently syntactically ambiguous, the pronunciation of early constituents differ systematically depending on upcoming syntactic structure, and adults — but not young children — are able to use these acoustic cues to predict the structure of a sentence while it is still syntactically ambiguous.
Students will learn both technical aspects of research (how to collect and analyze sentence comprehension and production data) and more theoretical aspects of research (how to develop testable hypothesis). Previous undergraduate RAs have developed experiments in which they investigated how pragmatic, syntactic and lexical factors influence the way native English-speaking adults say sentences. Future Aresty students could, for example, test native English-speaking children to see when they start using acoustic cues to understand English sentences. They could also test adults who learned English as a second language (ESL) to see whether age of acquisition and/or fluency in English influences whether ESL speakers use acoustic cues to guide sentence comprehension.
PERINATAL ENVIRONMENT AND GENETIC INTERACTION (PEGI) project. In this twin study, we are investigating how genetic factors and various prenatal and postnatal environment factors affect linguistic and nonlinguistic development. Students will learn both technical aspects of conducting twin research (e.g., coding, entering, and analyzing twin data) and theoretical aspects of twin research (e.g., how twin data can be used to test hypotheses about development). Armed with this knowledge, the student will investigate how genetic and/or specific environmental factors affect a particular aspect of development. Examples of projects conducted by former undergraduate students include 1) the impact of perinatal infection on children's development, 2) the impact of older siblings on twins' development, and 3) the impact of genetic factors on various aspects of phonological development.
|
Sign in
to view more information about this project.
