I am interested in just about all areas of psycho/neurolinguistics, but my research focuses primarily on how native and non-native speakers comprehend sentences. My recent projects have dealt with questions like the following:
How do people comprehend sentences containing elements that must be linked across intervening words and phrases?
- How is subject-verb agreement computed?
- How are referential properties assigned to unpronounced pronouns in Japanese?
- What are the neurocognitive mechanisms involved in establishing links between pronouns and their antecedents? Do these mechanisms differ depending on the relative position of these elements in the sentence?
- Why are subject-extracted relative clauses easier to comprehend than object-extracted relative clauses?
- How do binding constraints influence the online processing of reflexive anaphors?
How are words and their meanings accessed during sentence comprehension?
- How is a single meaning selected for a word that has multiple meanings (e.g. bat)? How do different sources of information contribute to this meaning selection process?
What do people learn when they learn a second language (L2)? How do people access and deploy this knowledge during real-time L2 processing?
- How much overlap is there between the first language (L1) and L2 representational systems?
- To what extent is L2 processing influenced by the L1?
- Do native speakers and non-native speakers compute grammatical structure for sentences in a similar way?
What are the best ways to address questions related sentence comprehension?
- What are the advantages and disadvantages of the methods commonly used to examine real-time sentence processing?