My research focuses on the neurocognition of adult second language acquisition (SLA) and bilingualism. I use behavioral and neurocognitive techniques (event-related potentials) and combine insights from multiple disciplines including psycholinguistics, applied linguistics, cognitive psychology, and social psychology to address questions in two lines of research, outlined below.
Neuropragmatics, bilingualism, and social context: speaker identity and listener experience
When we listen to a person talk, there are rich socio-pragmatic cues that provide details about the identity of the speaker, for example their age and sex, and these cues can influence important aspects of language comprehension. In our increasingly multilingual society, one salient cue to speaker identity is a foreign accent in most bilingual speakers. In my neuropragmatics research, I study the interplay of accented bilingual speaker identity, different profiles of listener experience, explicit and implicit social attitudes, and neural mechanisms of language comprehension in adults and children.
Individual differences in adult second language acquisition (SLA) and language comprehension
In general, people show a great deal of individual variability in skills or strategies. Language is no exception. In my second line of research, I study the effects of individual differences in biological, cognitive, affective, and social factors on adult second language acquisition and language comprehension. Within this line of research I also examine how individual differences interact with language learning contexts including incidental meaning-focused exposure, study abroad experience, and explicit grammar-oriented exposure.