Research conducted in the SDSU Language Processing Lab focuses on grammatical processing  in monolingual and bilingual speakers of Spanish and English. The broad question we aim to answer is whether bilinguals make use of the same cues to meaning that monolinguals do during real-time comprehension. Most of our experiments involve reading at the sentence level using online techniques such as eye tracking and self-paced reading. The lab houses an EyeLink 1000 eye tracker (SR Research) and laptops that run SuperLab (Cedrus) stimulus presentation software. Topics of recent projects include the processing of various phenomena by heritage Spanish speakers, including noun-adjective gender agreement, subject-object ambiguities, agreement attraction, pronominal ambiguities, and relative clause attachment ambiguities, among others.

Some Ongoing Projects

• Measuring heritage language proficiency for research purposes: In this study, Lisa Arzaga Hart and I address various questions regarding the use of the modified DELE test (Montrul, 2012) to assess proficiency in heritage Spanish speakers.

• Using the Box-Cox procedure to normalize timed measures: This practical primer provides a step-by-step guide to performing the Box-Cox procedure in R to normalize timed measures.