Research

Research Statement

In my research, I seek to understand how different kinds of online and offline measures connect to an individual’s knowledge of grammar, which in turn provides insights about language. Through the use of various experimental methodologies and the use of variable language (e.g., minoritized languages & dialects, graded sentence constructions, and prescriptive norms), I aim to assess the nature of the relationship between these online and offline measures to fully understand the nature of our experimental tools. I ultimately seek to determine how best to use these tools to understand the underlying cognitive differences existing in variable and standardized language varieties.

Interests

General Interests: Sentence Processing, Neurolinguistics & Psycholinguistics, Syntax and Morphosyntax
Primary Interests: Dialectal Variation in American English, Experimental Syntax, Relationship between online & offline measures
Main Methods: EEG, Acceptability Judgments, Eye-tracking
Secondary Interests: Priming, Speech Perception

Projects

Ph.D. Dissertation: The Relationship between Implicit and Explicit Measures in sentence processing

Ph.D. Qualifying Research Paper: Accounting for the Variation in the Distribution of Quick and Quickly: A Minimalist Syntactic Analysis

Undergraduate and Early Graduate School Projects: Turkish Questions, Phonological Natural Classes within P-base, Expletive There



Current Project: Ph.D. Dissertation (Expected April 2021)
The Relationship between Implicit and Explicit Measures of Sentence Acceptability

Virtual Poster Presentation from CUNY 2020 Human Sentence Processing Conference

Examining behavioral and electrophysiological coherence in a construction demonstrating gradient acceptability

Abstract (CUNY 2020)

Current psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research has separately shown that gradience exists in both explicit acceptability judgments and implicit neurolinguistic responses collected from electroencephalogram (EEG) (Sprouse et al. 2013; Gouvea et al. 2010). Typically, these two data types are collected and analyzed separately (Gouvea et al. 2010; Tanner 2019). This experiment’s aim is to explore whether there is a link between explicit judgments and implicit responses in tasks targeting sentence acceptability. Put explicitly, do gradient acceptability judgments to a target construction also show gradient implicit neural responses in a lockstep fashion? These two measures are compared in two experimental conditions: i) sentences argued to exhibit gradient acceptability due to variable complementizer realization (Sprouse et al. 2013; Martin 2001) and ii) sentences known to be ungrammatical in subject-verb agreement (Tanner 2018). Preliminary results show that both sentence types elicit P600 responses, however alignment of this P600 response with explicit acceptability judgments differs across the two conditions.

Supplementary material available here.

Current Project: Lexical and Social Priming Effects in Speech Perception

Abstract from the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2019 Proceedings Paper

During speech perception, listeners utilize and integrate both linguistic and social information. Previous research has demonstrated that social information can affect linguistic decisions, but little research has examined whether these effects are bidirectional. We probe at bidirectionality in an eyetracking study in which, in each trial, participants first see a visual prime for one category (gender, lexical); participants then hear an auditory stimulus drawn from female-to-male and shack-to-sack continua and look to images of the non-primed category. Results replicate earlier findings that visual gender information can shift listeners' /s-ʃ/ boundary when paired with a non-prototypically gendered voice. The novel finding is that, in turn, visually primed linguistic information can shift listeners' judgments of speaker gender when paired with an ambiguous sibilant. Taken together, the results provide evidence of a bidirectional link between social and linguistic categorization in speech perception.


Social Priming in Speech Production and Perception Special Session Panel Discussion at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2019

Select Conference Presentations

  • Bouavichith, Calloway, Craft, Hildebrandt, Tobin, and Beddor. “Bidirectional effects of priming in speech perception: social-to-lexical and lexical-to-social,” 177th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. (Poster).

  • “An Underrepresented Adverbial Distribution in Great Lakes English,” Georgetown University Round Table 2019. (Poster).

  • Craft & Hildebrandt. “Canadian French rhotics and their continued change,” 176th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. (Poster).

  • “Examinations of Natural Classes in P-Base,” 21st Mid-Continental Phonetics & Phonology Conference. (Talk).

  • “Turkish scrambling within single clause wh-questions,” Turkish, Turkic and the Languages of Turkey (Tu+1; 2015). (Chapter in the Proceedings Volume).